Based on William Trevor's exquisite short story, this is an extraordinary piece of theatre about our dreams and the accommodations we make when they turn to dust. Set in the early 1960s and transposed from Ireland to rural Northumberland, it tells the story of Bridie, who lives with her sick father on their farm. Every Saturday night Bridie puts on her best frock and cycles to Mr Dyer's Ballroom of Romance looking for love. She is getting older; time is running out for her. So in her new red dress, defiant and desperate, she sets out for the ballroom for one last dance.
Despite some problems with audibility, there is only one thing wrong with Northern Stage's production: it cries out to be staged in a genuine village hall. But designer Neil Murray makes the best of the Playhouse, turning the vast stage into a space of undulating hills across which piled-up chairs snake like both physical and psychological debris. The space constantly transforms as the dancers trip across it: at one point the chairs slip down the slope like a landslide of letting go. The piece is largely wordless, almost nothing happens, and yet by the end of the evening everything is different: for Bridie, for each hopeful heart on the dance floor, for us as an audience. It makes you want to dance and cry.
Like so much of director Alan Lyddiard's work, it has a diffuse quality: often, the important things are on the periphery. There are no big statements, only tiny gestures: a woman picking a hair off a man's suit, the men strutting. It takes the lives of ordinary people surviving on the margins and makes them seem special, almost blessed. There is an acuteness about this that is almost frightening, as if the emotion has somehow been distilled: the quickstep turned into a love letter, the foxtrot into a litany of rejection. The piece has a caged grace but it avoids sentimentality. Like Bridie, it has no use for tears.
The play delves into folk memory and it reaches out across town and countryside. It is totally accessible but makes great demands upon its audience. It is a brave 75 minutes that takes us somewhere familiar and yet strange.
Until October 14. Box office: 0191-230 5151.
