EVERYTHING MUST GO

Sherman Theatre Cardiff

Irvine Welsh (and anyone else wanting to know how to bring young people back into the theatre) should take a trip to Cardiff. Now that rock 'n' roll, and Welsh rock 'n' roll in particular, is ... well ... the new rock 'n' roll, there are few greater enticements that a play can offer hip young things than the slogan "in association with the Manic Street Preachers". The Manics, hot from their double whammy at the Brits (Best British Band and Best Album), have taken time out to lend their support to this play about 'The generation without a voice, until now.' The fact that first-time playwright Patrick Jones is guitarist Nicky Wire's big brother is, of course, useful.

And so the young and the cool of Cardiff flock to Everything Must Go: a bleak tone poem set in the urban wasteland of South Wales. Opening with the declaration that "we didn't start fighting the war that's called 'living today'", it is a nihilistic call to arms for a generation raised on unemployment benefit and temazepam. Writer Jones is a published poet, and his first play drinks deeply from the well of assonance and the ancient traditions of Welsh lyricism. The characters unleash volley after volley of rounded blank verse and song lyric quotes in a diatribe of anger than sometimes rages into incoherence. The chanted refrains, pounding music and angst of an empty youth may invite parallels with Trainspotting, but Everything Must Go's roots are firmly based in the slagheaps and industrial estates of Wales.

The actors deliver the raging swathes of text with style, power and apathetic anger. As A, the articulate (anti-)hero trying to fight an enemy he cannot identify, Oliver Ryan is by turns funny and bombastic, touching and terrifying. As Pip, who is more resigned to the bleakness of his existence and gets what kicks he can from car theft and drugs, Roger Evans plays the perfect downbeat foil to Ryan's frenetic fluency. Director Phil Clark and designer Jane Linz Roberts create a bleak, macabre anti-wonderland in which set pieces are staged with meticulous precision and a swarm of extras, from green-smocked, face-masked robotic factory workers to a stylised monochrome graveyard which echoes a war cemetery.

Everything Must go is not a feel-good play. One character says regretfully "Words, it's all we've got sometimes." But when used so pointedly and profusely, words can leave an audience gasping for air in a flood of nouns, verbs and curses. Yet the Kraken of self-assertion that slumbers beneath this sea of language never wakes. With it's constant supine threat that "one day we'll find our voice" (but not today) and its railing against 'Them' - the faceless forces that hold the oppressed Welsh masses down - there are times when Everything Must Go is less Cool Cymru and more Whinging Wales. Either this play is a decade late in its depiction of the Welsh zeitgeist, or the crust of new-found Cambrian confidence is still tremulously thin. Many in Wales will hate this play simply for its bleak acquiescence in a culture of defeat. Others will laud it for exposing the other face of Wales, more real than the shiny chrome and glass of Cardiff Bay. As far as the new Wales is concerned, Everything Must Go is a pointing finger of accusation, not a fist raised in victory. And for those supposedly theatre-shy young people, it's the hottest ticket in town.

TOBY O'CONNOR MORSE