SUNBEAM TERRACE. To 12 April.

Leeds

SUNBEAM TERRACE
by Mark Catley

West Yorkshire Playhouse (Courtyard Theatre) To 12 April 2003
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm
Audio-described 10 April 2.30pm & 12 April 7.45pm
BSL Signed 11 April
Runs 1hr 35min No interval

TICKETS: 0113 213 7700
www.wyp.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 31 March

Situation comedy or a comic exploration of serious territory?Leeds' programme/script advertises the Playhouse Directors Club, offering 'the excitement and glamour' of theatre 'to entertain clients and reward staff'.

What 'excitement and glamour' would clubbers find in the current Courtyard show? Oodles of hardcore swearing, violence, drugs and a spot of lapdancing – there, perhaps, lies the glamour.

I can imagine some company directors getting increasingly redfaced at offering their clients such a night out. For the sake of inhabitants in the recognisable Leeds Mark Catley uses, let's hope there aren't too many insurance chiefs out there. There'd be furious red-lining the following morning – more postcodes where premiums rocket skyhigh or policies become an unobtainable aspiration.

Yet such considerations don't apply in a Sunbeam Terrace. This inner-city life is sub-urban. Ordinary rules don't apply. Ordinary considerations aren't in the air these characters breathe. This isn't part of a community: Alex Chisholm's production rightly yanks the room setting into a central island adrift amid a void of audience faces.

The characters are equally isolated, from each other and within themselves. Thug turned moral vigilante Hardman is thrown when he doesn't meet the fear he counts on. Lap Dancer is protected from any sense of a reflective self – leaving her baby and pram behind's just another event in her daily grind. At the age extremes Teenage Boy – who never uses the door when there's a back window - aspires to dealing drugs as elsewhere he might to a job with a car, while Old Man is, like his quiet optimism, unreal.

Which leaves young Dealer, intelligent yet agoraphobic – hating the outside as much as Hardman, though he responds differently. He's hardest to get a handle on. Yet he's at the action's centre, so the uncertainty knocks the play off-balance. Gary Whitaker plays him with suitable self-bemusement, but we never reach his core.

This script suggests two possible futures for Catley: exploiting his way with spare, witty, surprising dialogue to become an asset to any scriptwriting team. Or working to match these skills with a more coherent context, showing how the typical, realistic aspect of life mixes with the quirkily unpredictable human element.

Hardman: Mick Martin
Old Man: Geoff Oldham
Teenage Boy: Dorian Smith
Lap Dancer: Sally Walsh
Dealer: Gary Whitaker

Director: Alex Chisholm
Designer: Emma Williams
Lighting: Tim Skelly
Sound: Glen Massam

2003-04-03 00:26:39