THIS is the South Yorkshire contribution to York Theatre Royal’s Yorkshire Season, and more precisely it is the voice of a mining village community near Doncaster, just as Richard Cameron’s later play The Glee Club would be.

Revived this autumn as the opening play at Doncaster’s new Cast theatre, The Glee Club is an all-male piece. By comparison, Can’t’ Stand Up For Falling Down, Cameron’s groundbreaking one-act drama from the 1990 National Student Drama Festival, is an all-female work, although the dominant figure is a man never seen but nevertheless a physically menacing cloud throughout, imposing a regime of fear on his insular neighbourhood.

Written as a fluid series of criss-crossing monologues told in stream-of-consciousness mode, where the harrowing testimonies knit together at the vengeful finale, this 75-minute slither of theatre noir tells of the destructive impact of one brutal man, Royce, on three young lives.

Lynette(Lucy Phelps) is newly wed with a life of domestic abuse awaiting her and happier days as a lock keeper’s daughter behind her; Ruby (Faye Winter) is a single mother, sworn not to reveal the father’s identity; Jodie (Sarah Vezmar) is a troubled ten year old, emotionally damaged beyond repair.

Royce has ruined each life through a combination of being a wife beater, a stay-away dad (the child is a result of his regular play-away behaviour) and a thuggish bully, who was involved in two childhood incidents where a young boy fell to his death at a quarry and a second boy drowned when slipping as he took on a dare to cross a fast-moving weir.

The sight of a woman on a Yorkshire moor, so resonant from Wuthering Heights, augurs ill in Cameron’s play too, the landscape no less important than in Emily Bronte’s work. Dawn Allsop, designer of so many impressive and diverse Theatre Royal sets, matches Cameron’s harsh language in her oppressive yet open design.

A place of wilderness and wildness, it at once evokes a rubbish-strewn moorland quarry, a weir and the kitchen and stairs of a claustrophobic, hellish house, where the sound of running water has all the terror of Hitchcock’s shower scene in Psycho.

Cameron’s devastating play of violent crimes marks the directorial debut of Theatre Royal literary assistant John R Wilkinson, whose staging captures the work’s physical brutality and also bears testament to the director’s love of language.

He is blessed with three actresses from the Theatre Royal’s 2013 repertory season, whose intense performances could not be more contrasting to their earlier summer deeds. Lucy Phelps, the comedic star turn as Ida the servant in See How They Run, is the pick once more in this dark, trapped and cornered world, while Winter and Vezmar will haunt you too.

Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down, York Theatre Royal Studio, until November 16. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk