Confronted by plays about exiled northern writers returning to their roots I am always reminded of a classic Alan Bennett TV sketch. Standing in front of a picturesque slagheap, a duffel-coated, Hampstead-based scribe announces, "My father was a miner, my mother was a miner... and I'm a minor writer." There are moments when Jim Cartwright's narcissistic new play evokes all the cliches of the anguished northern odyssey.
Cartwright himself plays the hero, Burn: a famous novelist invited back to his school to present the annual prizes. Pissed as a newt, he ducks the ceremony to go on a night-time journey, alternately sentimental and surreal, loyally accompanied by his first love Ann. At the rollerdisco, he meets the mocking ghosts of his adolescent past. In an empty soccer stadium he is reminded of his youthful dreams of being an athletic right-winger as opposed, presumably, to a literary leftwinger. He even climbs a dizzy mountain of iron piping and threatens to repeat his early suicide attempt. Home is clearly where the hurt is.
"Who am I? Where am I?" he cries out at one point. And the temptation is to respond, "Who cares?" since the problems of burnt-out northern novelists do not rank high on most people's priorities. But the play's pervasive self-regard is mercifully offset by Cartwright's eye for the grotesqueness of everyday reality. One choice scene takes place in a pub where the determinedly eccentric landlord poses as Lon Chaney and emerges from behind the bar sporting frogman's flippers. Even better is Burn's encounter with Ann's solitary sister. She is torn between psychic glimpses of the future and vivid memories of the past - including the loss of her virginity when "strung up behind a fairground generator with a skinny greaser".
During scenes like this one is reminded of the salty particularity of Cartwright's first work, Road; and throughout there are conscious echoes of all his previous plays even down to Ann's disclosure of a startling singing-voice in a karaoke bar (a reference to Little Voice). The difference is that Cartwright's earlier work dealt with the bizarreness of northern life. The emotional anguish of a self-styled back-street Byron is of less universal appeal.
I can pick no holes, however, in Gregory Hersov's exuberantly episodic production in which the whole cast, literally, get their skates on, nor in Cartwright's committed, energetic performance as the peripatetic gutter-scribe. David Fielder as a zany publican, Susan Twist as a sexily frenzied spiritualist and Anthony Booth as an old working-class warrior, clearly ill at ease in his real-life son-in-law's Britain, also shine. But what the play proves is that Cartwright's real talent is for Jonsonian explo ration of public eccentricities rather than for portraits of the artist as a Lancastrian Lear.
• Until November 20. Box office: 0161-833 9833
