From the very beginning Road assaults the audience with a dizzying rush of emotions as it flickers between scenes, from house to house and room to room. The kaleidoscopic scenes are not incoherent though, for all are connected by the Road, an unidentified street in 80s Lancashire. The flood of impressions is almost overwhelming – the smell of perfume, of matches, of hot chips and cigarettes, the blaring punk music, the crashes of thrown chairs and bottles, screaming, swearing, and the eerie tinkling of a child’s musical box. 

The set reflected this, with jumbled piles of half broken furniture and the walls papered with newsprint (Varsity of course). The actors also shift rapidly between characters, and in most cases these transformations are carried off with great success. Just as all the different settings are joined by the Road, so are all the characters linked by the common sufferings of the unemployed in Thatcherite Britain. All the many varieties of human suffering depicted onstage stem from this single curse of joblessness, hammering home the writer’s (Jim Cartwright) political message.

Despite the unity of theme, the play is by no means monotonous. The change of tone is perfectly balanced so that grimness is interspersed with laughter and the banal is juxtaposed with the tragic. The cast handled these shifts with consummate skill, while effective use of physical theatre served to keep the many monologues unique and original. Innovative staging drew the audience into the action, making each person both a witness and a participant in the drama unfolding onstage, partly responsible for the desperate circumstances in which the characters were trapped. In many places the performers interacted directly with the audience, with one character in particular, Scullery (Jonah Hauer-King), leading the audience through the action. 

A few other characters also deserve particular mention – Joe Pitts gave a harrowing performance as Joey, deliberately starving himself to death, broken down mentally by the hopelessness and emptiness of his life. Ellen McGrath poignantly portrayed Molly, unhinged by a tragic background that is never fully explained. Picking out individual characters for special praise is difficult though, for the acting was exceptionally strong throughout – particularly impressive in a freshers play.

The costumes were good, the set creative, the music atmospheric, the staging was slick and innovative and the acting was brilliant – but describing these different elements can’t really capture how Road brings these basic components together into a performance that is intense, emotive, original, heart-breaking, passionate and full of energy. Road is a play that has to be seen to be believed.