Review: YEARS OF SUNLIGHT, Theatre503

There's a jarring note in the Tony Benn Diaries when he visits a new council estate in the early 60s and eulogises over its tidy flats, its communal play areas, its shopping parade of greengrocers and newsagents. It's easy to forget that these soi disant sink estates were once designed to be a new nirvana provided for people who had scraped a living amidst the disease and squalor of desperately poor inner city tenements. But it didn't work out that way.

Michael McLean's Years of Sunlight follows the lives of four residents of Skelmersdale, the new town constructed in a hurry from the cheapest materials available (a crucial difference from the System Built Swedish model and Le Corbusier's work in France) to rehouse Liverpudlians as slums were demolished. Unlike Kirkby, which always felt like a part of Liverpool even if it isn't, "Skem" is halfway to Wigan, four square in what Scousers call "Woollybackland", where people speak in accents owing more to Lancashire than Merseyside, and are culturally attached more to mill than dock. It's an arrangement that suited neither group.

Paul (Mark Rice-Oxley) grew up in Skem with his Irish single mother Hazel (Miranda Foster) and an orphan in and out of foster homes, Emlyn (Bryan Dick) - all with roots in the Scouse diaspora. Hovering around this awkward menage-a-trois, middle class Lancashire man, Bob (John Biggins) has an eye for Hazel and a deep-seated distaste for Emlyn, whom he sees as a perfect representative of the thieving Scouser vandal stereotype destroying his community.

Through flashback (signalled a little confusingly by sets of iconic images and music that often seem to cover a period of five years or more), we slowly find out what has driven each from the other and why reconciliation seems unlikely. There are few happy endings in Skem, I'm afraid.

Foster's matriarch holds it together, her salt of the earth common sense making her an everywoman who is trying to do her best even if that blinds her to the envy it creates between her real son and her pseudo-surrogate. Rice-Oxley is good on showing the closeness between Paul and his sorta brother Emlyn, especially as 10 year old proto-scallies, on holiday in Rhyl. He's good too on the slow stretching distance that grows between them, even unto enforcing the tiniest of paybacks later in life, when he is a successful IT man riding the Celtic Tiger in Dublin and Emlyn is pathetically selling glowsticks.

Biggins's Bob feels the least well drawn character, a stereotype of middle-class entitlement - the Daily Mail reader given breath - and it's hard to see how Hazel put up with him, even if favours (sexual or financial) passed between them (hinted at, but not explicitly acknowledged). Dick's Emlyn more than covers that dramatic gap though, showing us the bright, artistic youth lost to drugs in the community of Skem that wasn't a community, Dick has something of Brookside's Gizmo in his demeanour and does the rage bubbling below the surface of a fundamentally decent lad gone off the rails very well. That his fate was by no means inevitable makes his demise all the more poignant.

Despite getting lots of detail right (even mentioning Seaforth, where I grew up), McLean's script doesn't quite give us enough that's new to really seize the moment - a moment when the people "left behind" in the likes of Skem are on the political agenda more than at any time since the concrete was poured. There's bits that feel like Blood Brothers, bits that feel like The Boys from the Blackstuff, bits that feel like This Is England, and plenty that feel like Phil Redmond-era Brookside - all fine inspirations, but all a little long in the tooth.

Maybe that's unfair, but then again, I saw a lot of this in personally as well as in those iconic portrayals of working-class life, so, rather like driving round the roundabouts of Runcorn New Town, it all looks a little samey to me.

(In the theatre lobby, there's an excellent exhibition of contextualising black and white photographs which is well worth seeing before going inside).

Years of Sunlight continues at Theatre503 until 18 February

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