TV Reviews : THE NEW SEASON : ‘Road’: Stark Portrait of Despair in England

“Road,” a British play about the tyranny of anger, boredom and unemployment in a squalid coal-mining town in Thatcher-era England, is a grinding season finale for “Alive From Off Center” (at 10 tonight on KCET Channel 28).

Jim Cartwright’s drama, reworked by the playwright for BBC-TV, is a stedicam endurance test, full of exhaustingly long on-camera confessions. The economic and psychological nightmare probably works much better as live theater (coincidentally, the stage version just opened at Stages in West Hollywood).

The bitter, gnarly characters walking these empty roads in a bricked-up Lancashire are too personally desperate to rant on about Parliament and the Queen. But the play is clearly political, reviving the angry young man shadow of John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger.”

The cinema verite focus on characters bemoaning their fates on desolute streets is excruciating. And the British accents are hard to understand.

What’s arresting, like a bad dream, are the early scenes in dreary, noisy houses and the concluding febrile moments in an abandoned flat. There two guys and their pickups (potent acting) find respite from madness by finding “soul,” as one says, playing a tape of Otis Redding’s version of “Try a Little Tenderness.”

But director Alan Clarke immediately resorts to overkill, with the youths’ chanting, hopeful fade-out--”Somehow we might escape!”--crying out for a scalpel instead of an axe.