THE seating had been arranged on all four sides of a raised stage. Feel the adrenaline.

The warning signs were up: strong language, smoke effects. More adrenaline. Excited, expectant faces, like that Turkey match on Wednesday. Yet more adrenaline.

Sometimes, the weary walrus critic can forget the buzz and rush of a new play, the thrill heightened by the play's local connections: Leeds writer, Leeds and Bradford actors, South Leeds setting. The Courtyard was jumping and pumping like Friday night.

Andrea Dunbar's ballsy blast from the Bradford estates, Rita Sue And Bob Too, had been premiered at that London hive of new left-field writing, the Royal Court in Chelsea. Twenty two years later, this time West Yorkshire would claim one of its own firsts, with director Alex Chisholm as the driving force.

Mark Catley's street drama, set in a flat on his old home turf, opens to Coldplay's Chris Martin wailing "We live in a beautiful world". The world in question is Beeston, South Leeds, and "Beeston in bloom"- the words of Gary Whitaker's Dealer as he looks out from his window - has moved on from booze and crime to drugs and violence.

One by one on Emma Williams's minimalist, dream-like, open-plan set, Catley's everyday players appear, their names signifying exactly what they say on the label. First Whitaker's edgy, mind-scrambled, life-weary Dealer, an agoraphobic drug dealer (such is the off-kilter humour of Catley's electric writing); then Hardman (Mick Martin), a one-man, street-cleaning vigilante squad with lead piping for a brain; Dorian Smith's Teenage Boy, a 15 year old drawn inexorably to a life of crime; Sally Walsh's Lap Dancer, a single mum who likes a dab of speed, can't resist a bad'un and hates her job; and Geoff Oldham's Old Man, guardian angel, confidante and only there in the imagination.

The language is strong beyond maximum Trebor strength yet never jars; the performances even stronger. The humour from such seemingly unpromising circumstances - agoraphobia, thuggery, suicide, inadequacy, self-loathing - is reminiscent of Irvine Welsh, Tony Marchant or Andrea Dunbar but still with an individual voice. The joke about the colour-coded bus route to Beeston being aptly named the Brown Line is but one of many knowing gems.

There is a distant echo of Joe Orton's taboo-busting, iconoclastic Sixties plays too, but Catley is not so ruthless. He counters brutality with something more tender: the beauty in Beeston as well as the beast, as they each strive to change their lives.

Box office: 0113 213 7700

Updated: 10:30 Friday, April 04, 2003