Road at the Royal Exchange Theatre – review

This big anniversary revival sees Jim Cartwright’s Road at 40, descending on the in-the-round cathedral of the Royal Exchange Theatre as the venue turns 50 this year. Both milestones meet like old friends in The Millstone pub, which has seen better days, but still serves a cracking pint.

Written in 1986 during the Thatcher era, Road remains a promenade through deprivation, desire and dark humour. Cartwright’s structure, all fractured vignettes and barbed poetry, can feel like channel-hopping through a nation’s nervous breakdown. Staged in this beautiful building in today’s “Broken Britain”, this production leans into the play’s battered lyricism rather than sanding it down into social-realist museum theatre.

The Royal Exchange proves the ideal crucible as its circular intimacy traps us inside the street’s claustrophobia. Designer Leslie Travers has transformed the whole building into a road, teaming with messy life moments that unfold all around the actual main production. There is no polite proscenium distance here. We sit almost knee-to-knee with characters whose lives are lived at boiling point, the air thick with fag smoke, cheap lager and thwarted longing.

If the evening truly ignites, though, it is in the female performances. Cartwright writes women who are funny, ferocious and heartbreakingly lucid about the bargains they have struck with men, money and mortality. Shobna Gulati, Lesley Joseph and Lucy Beaumont play a range of characters living on this road and each nail their respective roles. Darkly funny, poignant and gut-wrenchingly raw performances show that these women are survivors in a world where broken, discarded lives are the norm and not the exception.

The young women pulse with a restless, neon-edged bravado, their laughter sharp as broken glass. There is both vulnerability and defiance in their flirtations, a sense that sexuality is at once currency and camouflage. All the ladies are astonishing with one monologue in particular, delivered with a steadiness that feels almost surgical, slices through the auditorium. It turns domestic disappointment into epic tragedy without ever tipping into melodrama. The humour lands like a slap followed by a hug. You laugh, then feel the bruises begin to bloom.

What makes these performances so impressive is their refusal of caricature. In lesser hands, Road can become a parade of grotesques. Here, the women are complex constellations of rage, tenderness, survival instinct and bone-dry wit. They embody the endurance at the heart of Road: the ability to keep singing, flirting, fighting and dreaming even when the streetlights flicker.

In a play that unfolds as vignette scenes, not everything is executed successfully. The stark white bed scene lands oddly in this grubby little world. Johnny Vegas seems like perfect casting for the endearingly awful Scullery, yet it is difficult to fully separate him from his well-known comedy persona. Moments off stage in the pub at the interval are inspired. The final scene with “Try A Little Tenderness” by Otis Redding is mesmerising as a glimpse of real beauty brings momentary hope of a brighter future.

Forty years on, Road still feels like a howl down a terraced street at 2am. At 50, the Royal Exchange proves it can still stage that howl with thrilling immediacy. This anniversary pairing is less a nostalgic birthday bash and more a reminder that theatre, at its best, is a place where anger finds poetry and overlooked lives blaze, briefly and brilliantly, at the centre of the room.