Jim Cartwright is a Lancashire-born dramatist that I am ashamed to admit I have never heard of till I saw Road. Perhaps being a Yorkshireman, I thought that twentieth-century, hard-edged Northern writing was Alan Bennett, JB Priestley, Tony Harrison and Keith Waterhouse (well, perhaps not). I thought Lancashire was Hobson's Choice and Sheelagh Delaney …

Wrong! Cartwright is an articulate observer of life under Thatcher in the 1980s: miners' strike, IBM's first PC, GCSEs and the fall of the Berlin Wall, according to the programme. The play, commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre in 1986, vividly, sometimes sensitively and sometimes brutally, draws the audience into the lives, homes, thoughts and escapades of the inhabitants of the nameless Road.

And what a bunch they are. This is Coronation Street (see what my colleague Oscar O'Lune thinks of that!) on speed – not a shred of the banal, and lashings of naked realism. Yet underlying it all is a great tenderness – Cartwright so obviously cares about the feelings and events he so lucidly depicts.

So too did this production, well directed by Elizabeth Wood. In the fine acoustics of the wrongly-named Princess Margrethe Hall (she is now Queen Margrethe II of Denmark) and on an expansive set with the audience interestingly on two sides, the oddball but all-too-human characters sprang vividly to life.

Of particular note were the performances of Wayne Jackson (Scullery the Scally), Mat Schmolle (the doomed, desperate and depressed Joey), Dave Woodhead (Skin-Lad and Blowpipe – yes, you guessed their habits) and Vicky Evans and Nichola Mather (the irrepressible Louise and Helen).

The most striking scene in this ‘patchwork quilt portrait' was the finely-wrought and acutely-written death of Joey, which was stunningly and agonisingly delivered by a nearly naked and sweating Schmolle, whose sensual range of abilities as seen in his recent portrayal of Romeo are clear evidence of a promising future career. And he is a Southerner! – all the more credit to the lad. Di Caprio, eat your heart out.

There were other fine performances too with no obvious weak link (we don't do Anne Robinson here at Virtual-Lancaster, thank you). The huge set was imaginative and appropriate, and no obstacle to the all-important sense of intimacy which is what the piece is all about (unlike St Thomas' Church – see review of Antigone). It is good to see that the Theatre Group uses a variety of spaces with different dimensions – when are they going to do something in the open air or en promenade? Street theatre, perhaps (no pun intended)?

Your Northern critic could not fault the accents, either, even though the director admitted that she was familiar with the Northern idiom, but that "some of the cast didn't even know what a ‘butty' was'. Well, it didn't show.

I subsequently discovered that Cartwright also wrote Little Voice (which was filmed in Scarborough – I taught Ewan McGregor's body double!). I have not seen that yet (I am not keen on Michael Caine), but shall be now be hunting down that video and the texts of Cartwright's other work.

Another good evening's entertainment from LUTG, to whom I am much indebted for introducing me to Cartwright's work – and for showing me, again, that they are more than up to the challenges they rise to.

Copyright © 20 March 2004 Michael Nunn