A hard man, said Mae West, is good to find. And that is the view of the hero of Jim Cartwright's strangely beguiling new play. Choke is a martial arts fanatic who doesn't go much on women. "I don't like the feel of 'em, everything gives, all pushy instead of pressy," he says.
Choke is what you'd call a man's man. He struts around his junk-filled backyard like a fighting-fit bantam cock; his instinctive way of greeting his only friend, Sump, is with a head-butt or karate chop. But Choke's tragedy is that he cannot admit he is gay. Almost everyone else in Cartwright's play, from Sump to the glass-painting Friar Jiggle and the flouncing Yack, who wears a stuffed cat for a hat, is only too happy to remind us it's queer up north. In a way, the play takes us back to Road, with which Cartwright made his galvanic debut. There's not a lot of plot, and some minor figures are shoehorned in like cabaret turns.
Cartwright's great gifts are for mood and language. He pins down a certain kind of tender-tough, equivocal northern maleness with deadly accuracy. He also has a talent for demotic poetry. He's a strange mix of Ben Jonson and a soap-writer, and the two elements merge harmoniously in James Macdonald's production and Geoff Thompson's fight choreography, in which the climactic battle is clearly a form of sublimated sex.
Nicholas Woodeson's Choke is a powerful mix of repressed solitude and bullish posturing and there is strong support from Richard Hope as his fighting partner and Hilda Braid as a caricature northern neighbour. But possibly the real hero is designer Rob Howell, who is responsible for a backyard overflowing with rusty Heath Robinson contraptions. Since he also designed The Graduate, you might say he's moved from one kind of junk to another with mind-boggling versatility.
Until May 6. Box office: 0171-565 5000. A version of this review appeared in some editions yesterday
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
