BMX is either one of the world's most evolved extreme sports or an unavoidable urban nuisance, depending on your point of view. For each champion freestyler, there has to be a hoard of noisome youths clattering round the kerbs of every precinct in the country.
The sport has already spawned its iconic movies (BMX Bandits, Rad). Now it makes its first incursion into live theatre in an ambitious collaboration between the UK's Contact and a Melbourne-based company, Arena.
Louise Wallwein's script tells the story of McStone, a young man on the run from the authorities, who forges a new identity for himself amid a gang of BMX ragamuffins - a freewheeling, narcotic-smoking "underclass of the underpass" who express their disaffection for the system by performing elaborate stunts on bikes. There's a muddled sci-fi element to the plot, which involves a two-wheeled raid on a shady Orwellian ministry of paper. And the cast are invariably more articulate in the saddle than on their feet: numerous passages of dialogue devolve into little more than angry bouts of amplified swearing.
Rosemary Myers's production marshals actors, competition-level cyclists and audio-visual effects into something approaching a cohesive whole. For all its futuristic overtones, though, there is something quaintly retro about it. In fact it's impossible to witness performers whizzing through lasers without being faintly reminded of Starlight Express.
Some of the stunt riding is worth the price of admission alone, however. Even someone who can't distinguish a tail-whip from a foot-jam can marvel at the riders' extraordinary liberties with gravity. As a concept, Skid 180 occasionally strains a little - though it's nothing a squirt of chain lubricant shouldn't solve.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0161-274 0600.
