EX-SEAMAN Scullery is a walking illustration of the term ''streetwise.'' Road is his road, where he's a popular vagrant jack-the-lad -- winningly and physically played by Gerard Kelly -- introducing us to the rest of the populace who are not going down in history, just down. This is the hardbitten underbelly of Thatcher's Britain. Ten years of false escape into drink, sex and squalor, but no-one is wallowing in it. Everyone knows it is not enough.
In cold print the residents seem fantastic, but the company makes each one uniquely believable and, however sad and even depraved, eventually touching. Kathryn Howden's aged Molly with her half-remembered songs, Douglas Henshall's Zen skinhead, Alexander Morton's nostalgic Jerry, reduced to tears by the smell of Brylcreem, Caroline Paterson's Carol reciting a mechanical chatechism with her mother to which the answers are the unattainable: respect and money.
Each act ends in a set piece. Joey (Neil McKinven), is a screwed up adolescent in a Smiths T-shirt who takes to his bed without food in an attempt to find a purpose to his life, but it's his girlfriend Clare (Cara Kelly in her first professional stage role and utterly superb) who best voices youthful disillusionment.
The play ends with another long exchange of masterly dialogue with soul music made the catalyst to coping with the outside world, and 7:84's handling of the scene is every bit the equal of the resonant television version. The performances throughout are uniformly strong and the actors never leave Geoff Rose's effective multilevel set as they change clothes from one character to the next. There is no journey to the heart of Cartwright's darkness, the horror comes to the Road and the escape that Otis holds out is a hope rather than a prospect.
KEITH BRUCE
4 May 1989 - The Herald