Road

As coincidences go it was bizarre but not groundbreaking.

A year earlier the company, Brighton Theatre Collective, had made a one-man show about child abuse. Screaming Inside arrived just as the Jimmy Savile scandal hit the headlines. The play won an Argus Angel for artistic excellence.

Road director Julian Kerridge admits the two combined start to make it look like the company has prophetic powers for picking productions.

“It was extraordinary,” he says. “There is some weird synchronicity going on. There’s a Spitting Image doll on the poster [for Road] and a huge 1987 written on it because that’s when it is set. Thatcher died aged 87.”

Kerridge penned the blurb for the back of the flyer, which talks about the final years of Thatcherism.

“You can’t get away from the massive effect she had on these people’s lives.

“What I think about it is irrelevant. But I don’t know anybody – and I grew up in the north of England – I mean I don’t know anybody who liked her.

“There is a huge divide in society over her and what she did.”

Kerridge, an actor who has appeared in working-class dramas such as The Bill, Fat Friends and Coronation Street, has recently begun making movies. His first feature-length film Seamonsters was about modern teenage love on the South Coast and was filmed in Worthing and Shoreham.

But he is taking a break to direct 26 performances of this timely reworking of Jim Cartwright’s play, which was voted in the top 50 of the 20th century in a poll by the National Theatre.

The play is the reason the teenage Kerridge wanted to be an actor.

“In 1990 I was a college drama student in Salford and the play had a profound effect on me. It made me want to act, it made me love theatre. I’ve wanted to direct it since then.

“It is not the kitchen sink drama people expect it to be. It’s a piece of pure theatre and almost like a circus. In the way you get with Shakespeare, characters give voice to their most primal inner demons.

“It is rare to see that sort of thing. I think because it is Jim’s first play, it exploded out of him. I think he just wrote it out of a need to get rid of this stuff.”

Kerridge calls it vicious, brutal, poetic, funny. He says incredible eloquence mixes with northern life writ large, à la Rita, Sue And Bob Too, but “even more full-on, in an extremely funny and sweary, terraced road in Bolton in 1986/87 way”.

The characters address the audience as if they were neighbours of the irrepressible Scullery, who leads them on one long night out where time plays tricks on the mind.

“You have monologues delivered from people’s houses or from the street or from the pub, which lets you into their soul and psyches.

“It’s very non-linear. It’s a patchwork of ideas, more like a drunken rant than a beautifully constructed five-act play. It’s honest and funny.”

An eight-strong cast of professional actors includes Brighton Theatre Collective founder Janette Eddisford and 2012 ACT graduate Nicola Ollivere.

Kerridge has seen the 1987 TV production by Alan Clarke, starring Jane Horrocks, but refused to return to it as research.

“You have to reinvent and use the talent you’ve got. You should play to everyone’s strengths and start from scratch.”

So the production is site-specific, and the play continues into the pub through the interval.

“It’s raw and beautiful and profoundly human. It’s a scream in the dark, a slap in the face and it still makes me laugh.

“What angers me is that these people still exist and they are still poor. They still feel useless and discarded.”

• Road is at the Academy Of Creative Training, Rock Place, Brighton, from Friday, May 3, to Saturday, June 1, as part of Brighton Fringe. Weds, Thurs and Fri 7.30pm, Sat 2pm and 5pm, Sun 5pm, £9.50/£7.50. Call 01273 917272