'Magical, funny and bitter. It is a northern Under Milk Wood, high on booze and pills’
Sunday Times

THIS IS OUR ROAD! But tonight it’s your Road ‘an all!

The Octagon brings the exceptional work of Bolton-born playwright Jim Cartwright back home with his incredible breakthrough play, Road.

Road takes you on a passionate and poetic ride through one wild night of laughter, violence, booze and sex in one road in a small, dejected Lancastrian town. With rum-soaked wide-boy Scullery as your sharp-tongued tour guide, it’s time to meet the locals. Moving from street corner to living room, from bedroom to kitchen, the street’s inhabitants are introduced, showing their socially and emotionally charged lives in the north of Thatcher’s prosperous Britain. But throughout their outrageous stories of sadness, brutality and regret, there remains a tender hope that ‘somehow a somehow a somehow’, they might escape.

Long before Shameless startled the UK with the reality and hilarity of life on a Northern housing estate, Road opened a window on a hidden area of northern life, giving a lyrical voice to the dispossessed and deprived. Jim Cartwright’s exceptional writing debut broke incredible new ground when it was first produced in 1986. Road was recently voted one of the top 50 best plays of the 20th Century in a poll by the National Theatre.

This production celebrates the long and glorious association between the Octagon and the internationally renowned Jim Cartwright, who wrote the classic play Two while working as writer in residence at the Octagon. Road follows on from The Octagon Theatre’s hugely successful ‘Cartwright at the Octagon’ season in 2005, which featured his plays Two and Eight Miles High.

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