STAGE REVIEW : Stages’ Static ‘Road’ Covers FamiliarWorking-Class Turf

The sign identifying the Lancashire street is bent and broken like the northern English town itself. The street name is gone, so the sign only reads “Road,” the title of Jim Cartwright’s impressionistic survey of jobless Brits in Thatcher’s go-go ‘80s. “Road,” at Stages, can’t help but be political, regardless of Cartwright’s on-the-record insistence that he didn’t mean it that way.

After the long wave (at least a decade) of polemically leftist theater, partly in reaction to Thatcherism, most British playwrights are wary of carrying protest signs. The poor are poorer, the rich richer. What good has it done?

Under such conditions, the young playwright’s best revenge is stylistic. That was the young Steven Berkoff’s strategy in the ‘70s, making his tough poor poetic and raunchy in “East” and “West.” From the praise attending “Road,” a sleeper first produced at the Royal Court, it sounded like Cartwright was also treading on new and different stylistic turf.

But underneath director John Markson’s outdoor staging, and Cartwright’s cinematic dissolving between street and domestic scenes and characters, is little more than an update of John Osborne’s working-class dramas. There are the same old people stuck in place, the same young people distressed at the chasm between their dreams and realities, the same long, drunken nights.

There is also some of Gorky’s “The Lower Depths” here, especially in light of Stages’ recent production with homeless actors in a similar outdoor environment and the Actors’ Gang’s version.

In neither version, however, was there the feeling of actors playing at being down-and-out. In Markson’s hands, “Road” often becomes a series of poses, even though struck by very talented actors--including Lee Arenberg (who was in the Actors’ Gang “Lower Depths”), Ian Abercrombie, Paddi Edwards, Maria Hayden.

Markson, on the other hand, doesn’t have a deep text to play with in the first place. Because Cartwright intends a panorama of Lancashire life, he glimpses his 17 central and 16 peripheral characters with the rapidity of a flipping photo album--and with about as much substance.

Look at the battling mum and daughter (Edwards and Rachel Dix). Check out the guys (Jeb Brown and Mark Laing) getting ready for a pub crawl while Dad (Abercrombie) sits glued in front of the telly. Here is a fellow (Brown) so depressed he refuses to eat, while his faithful girl (Hayden) stays with him.

Arenberg’s Scullery is the sodden guide through these sketches, and, being good followers, we assume the trip has a point. But like his Lancashire folk, the arias of rage Cartwright writes for them never rise above the woeful to the tragic. If there’s any fall in “Road,” it’s from drunk to more drunk.

That’s the only real difference between the two acts, and the actors haven’t any room to make “Road” resound emotionally. Arenberg suggests a guide who might turn on us at any moment, and Dix, Hayden and Edwards put on a clinic on how to juice up some pretty dry writing. Jim Barbaley’s platform stage and street environment, with Ken Booth’s lighting, mix Osborne with Dickens. Which fits, since “Road” looks back in anger, not forward.

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