One function of drama is to take us into unfamiliar territory. On that level, Mark Catley's 90-minute play offers a vivid, saltily written picture of life in the deprived south-Leeds area of Beeston. What Catley has yet to learn is that a play needs to take its characters, as well as its audience, on a metaphorical journey.
Catley is very good at creating characters who are both generic and specific. Set in a Beeston bedsit, his play revolves around a suicidal drug dealer whose pad is invaded by a leather clad hard man on a personal mission to clear the streets of scumbags and smackheads. Playing Robin to this Beeston Batman on his moral crusade, the dealer discovers there is a complex history to his regular clients, including a local lap dancer and a teenage tearaway, and, when he is asked to join the hardman in beating up a paedophile, his resolution finally snaps.
Catley clearly knows these people inside out and catches their contradictions in candid, living speech. When the hard man announces he used to work at a nursery, the dealer understandably asks, "Weren't the kiddies scared of you?" only to realise that he is referring to a garden centre. And the self-improving lapdancer gives a highly plausible account of a creative-writing class in which there was objection to the term "brainstorming" for being offensive to people with mental health difficulties. Unsentimentally, Catley suggests that, even in the most deprived areas, people transcend easy social stereotypes.
But a play needs a developing action. Here the dealer's hero-worship of the hard man and his ultimate disillusion seem an insufficient trigger for suicide. Catley also fails to integrate into the plot a mystical old man whose only function appears to be to remind the characters of their responsibility for their lives. As social reportage the play is fascinating. But I am reminded of Joan Littlewood's advice to Shelagh Delaney when confronted by the raw veracity of A Taste of Honey: "Read Ibsen."
Even if Catley has plenty to learn, he is well served by Alex Chisholm's production. Gary Whitaker catches precisely the agoraphobic nerviness of the self-hating drug dealer, Mick Martin acutely conveys the fear under the hard man's intimidating surface and Sally Walsh is genuinely touching as the speed-driven lap dancer yearning for a better life. I admired the performance very much. But Catley's promise will be fulfilled when he realises that character is best revealed through meaningful action.
· Until April 12. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
