Danny is a scuffer. He's got no money, no girlfriend since bright Amy up and left him, no future, and by closing time tonight he's going to have no legs if he doesn't come up with the £800 he owes Cathy, the local loan shark. But maybe, with a lot of help from Amy and her dad Jack, a former hard-man turned softie, he can turn his life around.
So begins an odyssey through the streets of Leeds as the trio try to come up with the cash by fair means or foul. But will they complete the task before their luck runs out? It doesn't look likely with Leeds' very own Wicked Witch of the West, the twisted pornographer Cauldron, intent on preventing happy ever after. Mark Catley's play has the trappings of gritty drama but transforms itself into an urban fairytale and traditional task-and-quest story that comes complete with an improbable and mountainous (fairy) godmother.
There is an awful lot wrong with it - including something of a void at its centre in the character of the nice but dozy Danny - and an awful lot that is right, too. It is all heart, and quite impossible not to like. Yes, it is simultaneously contrived and unformed, quite scrappy, and in places so underwritten that it looks exposed on the big stage. The production requires much more snap to make the comedy really crackle: on the night I saw it, the timing was all awry in the early scenes. But it is raw, young and knowing, and Mic Pool's astonishing video projections that conjure an entire city as it races by, inject much needed pace as well as grounding the fairytale in a scruffy, backstreet reality.
Perky performances all round, too, particularly from William Ikley, who as Jack suggests a whole history and world in just a look and the silences between his lines.
· Until April 1. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
