CityLife

Our Friends In The North @ The Lowry

Familiar to most people as a hugely successful television series that made stars of virtual unknowns Daniel Craig, Christopher Eccleston and Gina McKee, Our Friends in The North actually started life as a stage play, written by Peter Flannery for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Now, twenty-five years later, Northern Stage have revived this epic drama to remarkable effect, with fourteen actors playing 43 characters across 17 years and two continents.

The only bad news might seem to be that Our Friends In The North runs for an epic three hours and forty-five minutes, but that time really does fly by once you're gripped by this absorbing production.

Believe me, I've seen a few 45 minute productions that felt longer than this! An extensive investigation into the nature of corruption and the abuse of power, Our Friends In The North tells its story, based on a number of real-life scandals and rumours in the Sixties and Seventies, through the stories of four friends - young and hopeful at the start of the epic, but sadder and, perhaps, wiser by its conclusion (newly written, incidentally, by Flannery for this production).

Idealistic left-winger Nicky (Daniel Ainsleigh) picks his increasingly disgusted way through the minefield of local and national politics, encountering corruption and soured idealism at virtually every turn.

The idea that politics is corrupt to the very top is emphasised in this new production by the inclusion of scenes omitted from the TV version, focussing on events in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and the way in which oil sanctions were flouted by much the same people who were making vast fortunes from the sort of inadequate social housing where young marrieds Tosker (Neil Armstrong) and Mary (Manchester Metropolitan University graduate Sonia Beinroth) find themselves trapped.

The fourth friend Geordie (Craig Conway), meanwhile, finds himself caught up in the sordid criminal underworld of London's porn barons and swept away in the tailwind of the bribery scandal that engulfed the London Metropolitan Police.

It might have been possible to lose the humanity of the story in the broad historical sweep of the events it dramatises, but that's averted by the sharpness of Flannery's writing, which rarely feels schematic; the fast-paced and slick production; and, above all, by some sterling turns by the actors.

This is a superb and utterly absorbing production that more than repays your time.

*Until Saturday March 21