Young people in gangs scrapping over local territories and maiming each other in fights may seem like a modern phenomenon, but Rona Munro’s drama, set on the poverty-stricken streets of Ancoats in the late 19th century, reminds us that’s not the case.
It’s 1895, and the Bengal Street Tigers and the Prussia Street gangs are both determined to get the better of each other, and internal rivalries are no less hotly contested when everyone wants to be king of the street. One of the fascinating things about the evening is the role that women played in the scuttler gangs. Rona Morison’s Theresa may be barely more than a child herself, but she’s known as the “mother tiger” providing an unofficial welfare system for other young women, including the needy Margaret (Caitriona Ennis) and young Polly (Chloe Harris), who wants to be one of the boys.
Played out on Fly Davis’s terrific design, which conjures the imprisoning daily grind of factory life, Wils Wilson’s murky staging never makes 19th-century poverty look pretty. When it rains, the puddles are tinged with rusty blood. Even in their sleep these exhausted workers are endlessly doomed to repeat the physical actions of the mills where they toil. No wonder they long to make their mark outside on the streets where even the faceless nobody of the mill, just a cog in the industrial process, can become a somebody if they prove themselves tough enough to be in a gang.
Munro draws neatly on 19th-century melodrama to tell a doomy story of torn loyalties and erupting violence. The writing is a mix of the lyrical and the iron-clad, but the early part of the evening lacks dramatic momentum, and characters and their relationships are too sketchily drawn for real audience investment. The show only catches alight as the two gangs face each other down, led by the reluctant George (Kieran Urquhart) and Joe (Tachia Newall) on one side, and on the other by Sean (Bryan Parry), keen to reassert his authority as “King of the Tigers”. They are unaware that death dances around them like a butterfly.
The terrific soundscape is full of noise and fury, the cacophony of the mill machinery and the stamping of clogs. Eddie Kay’s choreographed movement is impressive, too, in the way it invokes the grim, dirty poetry of everyday survival. But unlike working-class life in 19th-century Manchester, which was brutally short, the dramatic payoff here is a long time coming.
• Until 7 March. Box office: 0161-833 9833. Venue: Royal Exchange, Manchester.
