Theatre

Scuttlers, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

Colin Donald

Three stars

Between the heyday of the Gangs of New York (1860s) and the age of the Peaky Blinders (gangs of Birmingham, 1900s), Manchester's mill worker suburb of Ancoats was terrorised by the wars of the Bengal Street Tigers and the Prussia Street Gang and other "scuttling" (fighting) tribes.

Rona Munro's new play for the in-the-round Royal Exchange resurrects this long-buried youth culture, giving a good taste of the brutality spawned by the conditions in which the mass of mill "hands" spent their short and scantily-recorded lives.

Directed with tension and aggression by Wils Wilson, and acted with maximum energy by a large and busy ensemble cast, Scuttlers does a fine job in bringing these ghosts of Manchester's past back to vivid life, the sort of heritage service that only theatre can accomplish.

What exactly were these gangs scuttling about? Herein lies the slightly disappointing aspect of the play, as the answer seems to be nothing much more meaningful than the causus belli of today's football rivals, which limits dramatic potential.

Without presuming to imagine her characters inner lives too deeply - although she imparts a lot about their conditions - Rona Munro concocts a thin melodrama about ties across the tribal divide, its crises driven by the actions of damaged young people desperately trying to fulfill themselves.

An earlier generation of playwrights would never have written a play about the industrial workers of Manchester without forefronting the politics, but Rona Munro is less interested in her characters' life of labour than in the style and swagger with which they defied their lot on enforced days off.