Road at the The Helix in  DCU is reviewed by Fintan O'Toole and  Saddled at the Project Cube is reviewed by Peter Crawley

Road The Helix, DCU

Fintan O'Toole

It is probably no exaggeration to describe Jim Cartwright's 1986 play Road as the Look Back in Anger of the Thatcher years. Just as John Osborne's play crashed through the rather smug façade of English theatre with a howl of rage from the social margins, Cartwright's début, also at the Royal Court, made him the angry young man of his day.

Given the terrible toll time has taken on Osborne's reputation, the visit of the well-regarded Yorkshire-based Pilot Theatre Company is a chance to see where Road has gone in the last 16 years.

The play's initial impact had a great deal to do with its form. It is like the illegitimate offspring of Sean O'Casey and Samuel Beckett: a vivid kaleidoscope of a working-class community struggling with poverty but without the narrative conventions of traditional realism.

While English social realists had often created up-close images of deprivation, the realistic tradition had generally been infused with socialist hope. Things were rotten, life was hard, but the essentially noble working class would surely rise up soon and throw off the shackles of degradation.

Road is what you get when you take the socialism out of social realism. With Mrs Thatcher in power seemingly forever and the Left in apparently terminal decline, the mid-1980s were not a time for romantic optimism about the possibility of transformation. In Cartwright's vision, the unemployed denizens of his nameless Northern city are trapped in an apocalyptic, Beckettian endgame.

This Road leads nowhere and the only way to keep going is to distract yourself with bad sex, cheap booze and the occasional fight. In this vision, conventional dramatic narrative is meaningless, because one thing does not lead to another. Cartwright's bold solution was to create a shifting series of loosely related vignettes, orchestrated by a scabrous master of ceremonies, the homeless petty thief Scullery.

Twenty-two characters appear and disappear. A mother and daughter scratch at each other like cats in a sack. An old woman talks to herself. A middle-aged man torments himself with lyrical memories of the 1950s. A young couple starve themselves to death in bed. An ageing woman desperately tries to have sex with a soldier so drunk he's virtually comatose. A skinhead discovers Buddhism. In the final scene, a young foursome release their inner frustrations and chant a laconic prayer of hope to an absent God.

In the original Royal Court production, and in a subsequent staging by Rough Magic in Dublin, all of this was played out in an intimate, starkly simple, promenade style that had immense power. Marcus Romer's version for Pilot on the other hand is clearly designed for more formal, proscenium-style spaces. (It will play at the Lyric Hammersmith after Dublin.) It is much more elaborate, using a large-scale revolve, an insistent movie-style soundtrack and an extensive range of both recorded and live video images.

The combination of this more distanced style and the passage of time tends to make the play's flaws more obvious. The looseness of the structure seems only partly deliberate. The occasional attempts at a lyrical language seem more awkward. The pervading sense of despair tips over at times into mawkish self-pity. And it is more noticeable that, while the male characters are allowed to reach, however, inadequately, for ideas, the women are defined mostly by sex.

Yet, for all that, both the play and the production retain a genuine power.

Cartwright's evocation of poverty amid the plenty of developed societies is perhaps even more persuasive than it was 16 years ago, because we know that the abandonment of whole segments of the population in the Thatcher years was no temporary phenomenon. Whatever the failings, very few contemporary plays have created such an ambitious portrayal of an entire category of western societies.

And for all its sometimes distracting trickiness, Romer's production reminds us that Cartwright writes superbly for actors. His intense, highly concentrated vignettes have an energy good performers can inhabit, and this is a fine ensemble cast with a clear collective sense of what it wants to achieve. Nicky Goldie is especially good in the older female roles, where she extracts a dignity from humiliation with skill. In Karl Haynes, who plays a range of young male roles, the production has a star in the making. If the power of a key contemporary play isn't enough to attract you to the superb new Helix complex, there's always the cachet of being able to say you saw him before he was famous.

Road runs until Saturday.

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Saddled

Project Cube

Peter Crawley

Fumbling through the dark with only a blinking red bicycle light to guide the way, David O'Doherty begins a new comedy that is not quite stand-up, barely qualifies as a play, hardly constitutes a musical and yet provides a canny antidote to the seasonal glut of pantomimes.

The improbable proprietor of a bicycle workshop, where repairs revolve around the standard Western methods of actually fixing the problem, but take in such Eastern approaches as fine-tuning their auras, the artless Dodger and his wild-haired accomplice Bernie eke out a benign, sheltered existence where spanners are lovingly explained, swing-bins distrusted, jokes endlessly repeated and girls prove to be a foreign concept.

Such innocence is as startling as it is charming. Just as a calendar charting Stephen Roche's "road to victory" suggests an enclave from the present, so O'Doherty and Bryan Quinn's comedy seems to belong to a gentler time. Although you can see the influence of docu-spoof The Office in their awkward acknowledgment of the audience, or of Father Ted in their unflappable gombeen demeanours, Saddled's characters never hint at a modern mean streak beneath their blue overalls.

Consequently the material is as light as gossamer, veering from a reassuringly inane prattle of half-formed ideas and unfinished sentences to mock-serious safety demonstrations and amusing cycling simulations involving the audience.

Naturally, room is made for Dodger's lovelorn Casio-keyboard ballad itemising the similarities between women and bicycles - and no, such crude connections wouldn't even occur to him.

Childlike rather than childish, the "dynamo duo" coast through at a lackadaisical pace, unafraid of inaction or silence, before a sudden, utterly inconsequential plot brings their short spin to a halt. Winning you over via its own unassuming flimsiness, this idiosyncratic comedy strangely succeeds because, just like a broken bicycle, there's not much riding on it.

Runs until December 21st