The Road returns?

The Road returns?

This evening we went to see an amateur production of Road, by Jim Cartwright. It was performed by the Senior Group of Theatre in English Youth Theatre, Brussels, and directed by Stephen Challens. We went primarily because some of our daughter’s friends and classmates were among the cast. The performance was actually rather good, and some of the cast, who have already decided to continue with acting as a vocation, are clearly destined for greater things. The play was first produced in 1986. It explores the lives of the people in a deprived, working class area of Lancashire during the early 1980s, a time of very high unemployment in the north of England. The language is decidedly blue, and the cast clearly had fun at times in spitting out words they normally have to use out of the earshot of authority. But as the evening went on, the utter ghastliness and desperation of peoples’ lives at the time came across very well and switched my mood to one of glum reflection – for are we not now headed for another such period of desperation and despondency?