Road at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester - Review

★★★★★

Walking into the Royal Exchange Theatre didn’t feel like entering a theatre at all. Power lines hang overhead, streetlights flicker, rubbish piles high, and actors inhabit the space before you’ve even found your seat. Jim Cartwright’s Road has always been a brutal depiction of working-class Britain, but in director Selina Cartmell’s revival, the building itself becomes the estate, the pub, the pavement, and the community surviving Thatcher-era neglect. With such an ambitious production combining immersive theatre, semi-promenade staging, and in-the-round performance, can this revival capture the bleakness of Britain’s streets, or does it overwhelm the story it seeks to tell?

Johnny Vegas in Road. Photo Credit Ros Kavanagh,

Road follows a procession of characters across one night in Lancaster, affected by unemployment, poverty, and social decay. Guided by Scullery, audiences encounter fragments of lives rather than a traditional plot: lovers clinging to hope, drinkers chasing escape, families fracturing behind closed doors. There is no singular protagonist or neat resolution.

From the moment audiences steps through the door, the production has already begun. Designer Leslie Travers has transformed the Royal Exchange into an environment rather than a set. The performance begins long before the lights dim: actors mingle, argue above the garages, get dressed for a night out, and throw darts in the theatre bar. Most captivating of all is Lesley Joseph as Molly, quietly chatting to herself beside a shopping trolley long before the formal performance begins. It’s a deceptively simple piece of acting, yet utterly magnetic; audiences gather instinctively, watching life rather than performance.

Then, during the interval, the neighbourhood refuses to pause, as a DJ takes over, punters spill from a pub, a fish-and-chip shop hums into life, and somewhere above it all, a man climbs a telegraph pole. These moments are mesmerising precisely because nothing dramatic happens; They’re just real, messy, recognisable people.

The participation isn’t forced. You are free to observe rather than interact, making the experience accessible even for audiences wary of promenade work. If anything, the production leaves you wanting more of these roaming encounters; those fleeting (yet still scripted) glimpses of ordinary lives unfolding around you are among the evening’s most compelling achievements.

Shobna Gulati in Road. Photo Credit: Ros Kavanagh

Inside the octagonal auditorium, suspended television screens flicker with fragments of forgotten 1980s TV shows, helping to situate the action in its political and cultural time. The TV screens also allow a pre-recorded appearance by Sir Tom Courtenay, which feels like it should clash with the live environment, yet somehow lands perfectly. 

The creative team operate at an extraordinary level. Aideen Malone’s lighting constantly redirects the audience's focus across the chaotic space. Meanwhile, Tingying Dong crafts a soundscape that stretches beyond the performance area; conversations feel as though they continue down the street.

There are, inevitably, challenges. In-the-round staging is notoriously unforgiving, and the sightlines do suffer. Balcony action or sofa-based scenes sometimes leave sections of the audience watching backs rather than faces. Given the extensive use of suspended screens, live video relay could have easily fixed this — We have the technology! Similarly, certain pre-recorded video segments that actors lip-sync to feel oddly artificial within such an otherwise immediate performance. With a production that thrives on authenticity, these moments briefly jar.

However, the cast’s performances more than make up for this. As Scullery, Johnny Vegas is an inspired casting. His natural warmth and improvisational ease make him an ideal host. Vegas balances humour with melancholy, never sentimentalising the suffering around him but ensuring audiences remain emotionally tethered to his journey down the Road.

Lesley Joseph is magnetic. Whether as the fragile Molly making a cup of tea and applying makeup or as the lively and audacious Chip Shop owner, she captures both absurdity and heartbreak with astonishing precision. You find yourself watching her even when nothing “important” is happening; it is a performance rooted in truth rather than showmanship.

Comic brilliance arrives courtesy of Shobna Gulati, whose Brenda is an ale-swigging, working-class caricature, while her transformation into Marion delivers some of the shows darker, swearier laughs. Lucy Beaumont, despite no traditional acting credentials, delivers work of remarkable confidence and nuance, like a seasoned professional operating at full creative throttle.

The emotional heft lands devastatingly at the end of Act One, where Joey and Claire, played by Jake Dunn and Lucie Shorthouse, embark on a hunger strike, told through Cartwright’s dense, poetic language. In lesser hands, the scene could lose clarity; here, it becomes painfully absorbing. It is bleak, uncomfortable theatre. Cartwright’s writing remains the production’s greatest weapon. Like his masterpiece Two, the language is muscular, lyrical, and precise. Characters appear briefly and vanish just as quickly, denying easy emotional attachment. That fragmentation is intentional: Road isn’t about individuals but the failures within society. Its dark humour lands like a defence mechanism, and its political resonance feels chillingly contemporary.

Selina Cartmell’s directorial debut at the Royal Exchange could hardly make a stronger statement. This revival is bold, atmospheric, and unapologetically theatrical, the kind of work that reminds audiences why live performance matters.

Road doesn’t offer comfort. It transforms a venue into a living, breathing social landscape and trusts audiences to navigate its complexity. But one thing I know for sure is that this production is far from being ‘middle-of-the-road’.