DIRECTOR John Cooper introduced last night's opening performance by announcing how last weekend's street carol-singing had raised more than £700 towards the disabled lift facility that would enable Stagecoach to create proper seating at its church hall home.

That lift - nearly £20,000 is in the fund now - will take Stagecoach up to another level - metaphorically and physically. However, the most important 'lift' at Stagecoach will remain John Cooper himself: the lift up the acting ladder he gives to so many rising talents.

Earlier this week, Tom Fackrell - now making his professional pantomime debut in Aladdin at the Grand Opera House - was reflecting on Cooper's contribution to his burgeoning career. "Apart from the voice work I've subsequently done at theatre school in Bristol, everything I've learnt about theatre I owe to John, everything."

Praise indeed, and the performance skills at play in Sunday Morning At The Centre Of The World are testament again to Cooper's cohesive - sometimes coercive - work at bringing talent to fruition.

Stagecoach came of age as a youth theatre with a remarkably fulsome performance of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood some summers ago in the Museum Gardens. With six black chairs and no props, six young performers, all in 'Bible black', have handled Thomas's adult world and the Welsh accents with elan.

Now, with the addition of a bench, the six chairs are back, and so are the black clothes - full-length skirts for the three girls, coal trousers for the boys, cotton tops all round - and another teenage crop is revelling in the expression of a colourful depiction of community life, here being given its York premiere.

Unashamedly inspired by Thomas's work, Louis de Bernieres, author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, marked ten years of living in Earlsfield in 1998 by writing Sunday Morning, a radio play suffused with the humour, warmth, tragedy and gossip of a close, multi-cultural, suburban south London community.

Eight four-hour sessions have gone into creating that world, far removed from EastEnders misery, with Zoe Roberts, Anna Holbek, Angharad Ormond, Mark Pollard, Mike Barlow and Jack Smith playing old and new, human and animal (foulmouthed starlings for the boys; a duplicitous cat for Ormond).

Alan Crompton's coherent narration threads a needle through this patchwork quilt of magical life in an hour of joy that is a lift to anyone.

Box office: 01904 674675

Updated: 11:57 Friday, December 20, 2002