Review: Saturday Night & Sunday Morning, Harrogate Theatre, until March 8

11:49am Monday 3rd March 2008

HARROGATE Theatre, newly spick and span and financially prudent, has suffered the cruellest cut of all in the Arts Council's night of the long knives.

The decision appeared arbitrary - who would dare slash the budget of the media-focused Leeds rather than toffee-town Harrogate? - but at its heart was a judgement that this venerable theatre's artistic standards were not up to scratch.

The alarm bells had rung when chief executive David Bown and the board had jettisoned the post of artistic director in favour of an academy of all the (hired-in) talents. The consequence is a lack of identity, by way of contrast with Andrew Manley or Hannah Chissick's memorable stewardships, and the problem has been compounded by reducing repertory shows to two co-productions and a very good pantomime each year.

What's more, choosing plays then becomes harder, with less room for error and more likelihood of caution.

Hence another aged angry young man from kitchen-sink Fifties' England is dusted off for his punch-drunk comeback after Marcus Romer's museum-piece facsimile of Look Back In Anger last March.

Once was fair enough, to mark the 50th anniversary of John Osborne's misanthropic earthquake, but why should Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night & Sunday Morning follow so soon afterwards?

The novelty this time is to place this most masculine of Nottingham working-class dramas in the female hands of guest director Joyce Branagh (yes, Kenneth's sister), designer Joanna Parker and Nottingham-born writer Amanda Whittington (of Ladies' Day fame).

However, it remains the Arthur Seaton show, the sex and booze and rock'n'roll tale of a cocky bicycle factory worker (Oliver Farnworth, from Hollyoaks) who sleeps with married women and drinks till he can't think.

Parker's design, with its bicycle motif, patterned industrial and domestic flooring and Ferris wheel-video backdrop, is modern yet nostalgic, but Branagh's direction lacks personality, never filling the stage with life.

Farnworth is pin-up material, lightweight by pale comparison with 1960-vintage Albert Finney, and Whittington's script, 45 minutes each way, is snappy but devoid of fresh perspective.

Saturday Night & Sunday Morning has had its day.

After 25 years of reviewing at Harrogate, I pray that the same cannot be said of a theatre that has come back off the canvas so many times, but art, not the heart, must rule and the art needs a rethink.

Box office: 01423 502116

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