We Were Not Only the Wreckage: Watching Road at the Royal Exchange

Jim Cartwright’s Road is powerful theatre. But the gaze it invites leaves little room for the creative life that existed alongside the damage.

I left the Royal Exchange Theatre impressed, unsettled and slightly irritated.

Jim Cartwright’s Road is a celebrated play of northern working-class life, and this new production is visually sumptuous. The theatre was sold out. The audience embraced it. I wanted very much to love it. This place. This theatre. These people. This town. This region.

The street of the play is simply called “Road”. The sign has broken off so that we can project our own street name onto it. The Royal Exchange production leans into this by transforming the theatre into a kind of domestic Armageddon. The atrium becomes a wasteland of burning bins, rubbish, scattered furniture and chaotic detritus. A chippy. A pub. A mobile disco van. Wellies on sticks. A dog somewhere in the wreckage.

It is visually powerful. The mess becomes theatrical spectacle.

Johnny Vegas, credited under his stage name, plays the narrator Scullery. A drunken, lecherous ex-navy guide through the street. At one point he tells the audience: “We are watching them. You have watched us.”

But I felt something slightly different.

I felt I had been depicted, and was now watching someone else depicting us.

Much of the staging is genuinely brilliant. One moment lingers in particular. An empty chair is filmed live while Tom Courtenay appears on screen, reflecting on earlier decades of full employment, national service and dance halls. He does not only romanticise the past. He remembers the misogyny too. I make an observation amidst the heartbreaking loss in this scene: his 1950s were closer to the play’s setting in 1986 than we are to that moment now.

The thought opens a window onto history.

But the lives unfolding on the street rarely receive the same depth.

One moment stayed with me. Joey retreats to his bedroom, fasting toward some private enlightenment. Bed linen, locked doors, the slow collapse of the body. A strange Christ figure in a terrace house.

It is haunting.

But I caught myself thinking something else too. He had his own bedroom. On our street that would have counted as privilege.

Joey is also the one character who sees through the supposed dignity of work. The jobs have gone and the idea that work itself carries meaning has collapsed with them. He says it plainly. It is one of the few moments when someone in the play steps outside the drunken churn of the street and tries to name the emptiness beneath it.

But that clarity sits on the margins.

The play insists, again and again, on a single reading of working-class life. A landscape of despair, drink, sex, violence and blind frustration. It is presented with sympathy, but it remains a narrow frame.

I grew up on streets like this. The hardship is not fiction. But alongside it were allotments, books passed between neighbours, bands forming in damp garages, odd bursts of art and political argument. Desperation was there, absolutely, but so were pride, fear, stubborn intelligence and a deep resistance to being reduced to caricature.

Road rarely allows that resistance to appear.

There are moments of brilliance. Shobna Gulati’s seduction of a semi-comatose squaddie is extraordinary: music hall slapstick, perfectly timed, generous and mischievous. The audience roars with laughter and rightly so.

But even these gorgeous scenes remain trapped inside the same frame. The street becomes a spectacle of collapse rather than a place where complicated lives are being lived.

The male characters are particularly revealing in this respect.

Two figures stand out. A skinhead appears, bringing stylised menace and the threat of violence. Then there are the young men in suits, swaggering and manipulative, drifting through the street with a sense of casual entitlement. Both represent different forms of male aggression. Both are ugly in their own ways.

Yet they are also oddly familiar images.

The suited men feel less like figures from 1986 than like ghosts from an earlier cinematic working-class past. They dress and move like something out of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: narrow suits, swagger, the residue of a 1960s archetype of the northern lad. They know the words to Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness, but the tenderness itself is nowhere to be found.

It is telling that these men are repeatedly punctured by the women around them. The female characters often see through their posturing and expose the emptiness beneath it. Those moments are some of the sharpest in the production.

But the male imagery remains curiously frozen in time.

The street is set in 1986, an era already shaped by post-punk, casual culture and the strange visual mix of late Thatcher Britain. Yet the men on stage often appear as if drawn from an older cultural template of working-class masculinity.

It is another way the production risks narrowing the frame.

At one point a character talks about wanting to be clean. The line passes quickly, but it carries a weight that will be familiar to anyone who grew up on streets like this. Clean did not simply mean washed. It meant being seen properly. Being seen as equal.

The sense of being judged was everywhere.

On our road there were moments when visitors arrived from the new estates, those freshly assembled crescents of white and beige décor. They would wander through as if entering some strange amusement park. The back alleys with bike parts and half-built engines, onions drying in sheds, water butts and improvised workshops. To us these were simply the infrastructures of everyday life. To them they were curiosities.

You could feel the gaze.

Something of that gaze flickers through this production too. The stage becomes a theatre of Armageddon: wreckage, shouting, bodies collapsing into drink and exhaustion.

It is magnificent theatre.

But this is where the review stops being about whether the production is good theatre. It clearly is. The question is what kind of gaze it invites, and who gets to control the narrative of working-class life.

Working-class life has long been one of the few social worlds that can still be caricatured freely on British stages and screens. The drunken street, the thuggish lad, the collapsing household. These figures circulate easily, often without fear of much reprisal, because the people being depicted rarely control the story being told about them.

None of these images are invented. They existed. But when they become the dominant frame, the street turns into spectacle rather than lived complexity.

Part of the problem may be structural. The landscape of the arts in Britain remains overwhelmingly middle class in its routes of entry, training and leadership. That does not mean the artists involved lack sympathy or intelligence. Many care deeply about the lives they portray. But it does mean the gaze through which working-class life is viewed can slowly harden into something familiar: a settled picture of what “working-classness” looks like and how it behaves.

Once that picture solidifies, the street becomes populated by types we already recognise. The drunk. The thug. The swaggering lad in a suit.

And the more complicated textures of life, the making, the thinking, the quiet resistance, slip out of view.

Slowly an implication settles over the production. Nothing good can come from here.

Yet we know otherwise. I know otherwise. The city where this play is set proves it. The legacy of those same streets runs through the place now, somewhere between the shiny corporate towers and the stylised drinking culture that replaced the old pubs.

What’s missing in this depiction is not hardship. The hardship is real. What’s missing is resistance. Survival. Meaning. The play asks us to look at the street through a grim prism.

But those streets were never only that.

They were places where people built things, made music, grew food, argued politics, read books, repaired engines, wrote poems and tried, stubbornly, to shape meaning out of the conditions they were given.

We were not only the wreckage.

And that is the part of the street this production cannot quite see.