Road — Royal Court

It was for the NT. not by it. 

Coming below it are a number of plays that any writer would be proud to be thought of as having written better.

It is useful to have lived in a number of different sections of society, it means you have an empathy for most and a sense of who is truly representative and who is the outlier. 

EDIT: and I really don't get why you are name checking some of the other outstanding plays on the list. I'll even give them the Cooney play, it's the perfect example of British farce.

Thanks I'll let my PA know

I grew up just off the Old Kent Road... He wouldn't have the courage to get off the bus there nevermind tell us scumbags what he thought of us...

Time to ban this idiot.

You are just digging deeper, Some knowledge of different approaches to characterisation would help, that heightening is not the same as stereotyping, that social realism is not the only way to represent people who you see as lower class or to highlight 'issues', that montage and monologue are excellent means to represent isolated lives in isolating circumstances.

You wouldn't find it timely because you live in a rarefied world of metropolitan hauteur, haute couture and surfaces. Nicely packaged Terence Davies films that trade on nostalgia and quiet desperation have their place but the reality was/is loud, sweary, alive and often teetering on the edge of kicking off. The world of 'Rita, Sue and Bob, Too', of 'Shameless' (which, at times was scarily close to reality), of 'Bouncers'.

I've lived in comparative wealth and on the edge of poverty, surrounded by high culture and working men's clubs, suburbia and council flats. Parts remind me of relatives, parts my own teenage years. You get to know what rings true. Any attempt to claim objectivity and that you are talking about the production really doesn't cut it when you can't help inserting even more digs at the working class.

The final chorus of 'somehow a somehow might escape', that is so powerful. That was me, destined for the factories that would soon close anyway, drilled by my grandmother into the importance of education, of speaking properly and of not getting into trouble. 'Somehow a somehow'.......I escaped.

I saw this yesterday matinee and found it very moving.
I'm not going to bother scrolling back through this thread, I have no interest in seeing or engaging with the small-minded, sneering opinions I'm sure I'll find. Mainly because, to be frank, this isn't their play.

I grew up in a working class area in the South. Like most, my experiences have shaped me.
I recognised Scullery right away. The the way he speaks, the way he moves, the way people who know him move around him, (and crucially) the way those who don't know him move around him. My life is richer having been surrounded by people similar to those depicted in this play, there isn't an ounce of doubt in my mind about that.
It was enthralling, invigorating and joyful to see these people portrayed on stage, in all their messy, flawed glory.

I also know plenty of people who were, and still are, left behind.
What a perfect use of Lippy Kids.

TM's your man
This might help in the mean time seatplan.com/london/royal-court-theatre/

Also note for Road - "some episodes spill down a flight of steps towards the stalls." so the stalls may be a better experience.

This production is very rich from moment to moment and scene to scene but I regret that I also found it obscure, like most Opera and many Classical Theatre productions.

Most actors are cast in multiple named roles and also in other smaller, unnamed ones. And most scenes are played in the same, central space on the stage. So, when actors reappear in different scenes, there's often insufficient clue as to whether they are returning characters or new characters. I could only piece together the sense of what I'd seen by rooting through the playtext afterwards.

I completely missed the simple, central story of Carol and Louise in the first half because I wrongly thought that the actors were playing different characters in each scene. And, conversely, I wrongly identified bed-bound Joey as the same character as the stay-at-home brother in the early scene. And then I sat fruitlessly racking my brain trying to recall where Clare might also have featured in an earlier scene. Mark Hadfield's scenes were here diminished by the ambiguity as to whether they were each new or returning characters.

The final scene of mass community movement is very powerful (as is very much else, from moment to moment) and it made me reflect as to whether the director and designer had chosen deliberately to present Road as a total community and to strip out as many elements of individual story as possible. It would seem a slightly wayward approach - I don't really understand it.

Another Operatic aspect is the setting of the time of this production. The text is very specifically set in the time it was written and first produced. But this production seems to let the present seep in at times, although it completely ignores aspects of today's Lancashire towns such as the largely divergent White and Asian communities there.

In the original production, there was a whole road of individual dwellings set all around the promenading audience, so each character was physically linked to their individual set and everything was so so much more clear. I think that the repeated forum criticisms in previous posts of a "series of vignettes" stem from the casting and staging of this production - the audience isn't presented with enough information to properly follow all the narrative and character links which are actually there in the text.

And it doesn't help that the acooustic is too reverberant with this set - with clear sound only in the miked scenes staged in the enclosed room.

I'd still recommend seeing this production which is very fine in many ways. But it has also niggled me in the ways I've tried to explain.

I felt that it lost some of the direct clarity of the text but it added other things, evoking elements of later Jim Cartwright plays such as the music of Little Voice and the whimsy of Bed. Probably an intentional Operatic approach to be multi-dimensional.

I sat similar, a bit more central. I had the same sound issue, to a greater degree, at X because of its three-sided (and topped?) box set. I doubt it's an aesthetic sound choice (coldness?), more likely a feature of hard stage walls, and the problem is that I lose a lot of the dialogue - Obviously, it affects people differently, according to their hearing condition.


Lemn Sissay as Scullery was brilliant at bridging that gap but the staging does deliberately keep everyone else apart from the audience. I didn't mind that because in the text it is Scullery introducing us all to the road on this night so we should relate directly with him and we should just be observers of everyone else.

Ah, I'd forgotten he was meant to be drunk! He wasn't played as drunk. Yesterday afternoon, we (audience) didn't respond to some of his early addresses and I think maybe he held himself back, apart, a bit after that?

Oh, couples behind! At both Road and Queen Anne yesterday, I had elderly visiting Americans - in varying degrees of detachment and alienated disengagement with both shows. At least they were in premium seats at Queen Anne and making a disproportionately generous contribution to keeping West End theatre financially afloat! It reminded me how diverse is the audience of London theatre, especially the West End, which makes it hard for some shows to make a proper direct engagement with the audience. The Road couple behind were bemoaning the prevalence of Ivo van Hove productions everywhere they go in the world, and ruing the apparent extinction of straightforward direction! I'm not sure they made the leap to fully connect with Road but they were happy enough to lap up Queen Anne, as an exotic gem, which of course is pretty much how I encountered it too.

Thanks for the advice - the stalls seat was row B not C so - thinking about my neck - I'm going with the circle (the man in the box office said it was his preferred seat of the two).

I really felt that the play lost something by not being a promenade production, and this meant there was less of an impact.  I'm glad to see it again but I can't help thinking it was a better production when I first saw it in 1997