The lust for life Corral and Walter have at the end of Jim Cartwright’s new play is the same as they have at the start. The difference is age. The young friends who flee their Lancashire mill town for swinging 60s London have the same swagger and opportunism as the estranged couple we find at the end, begrudgingly making amends before it is too late.
Lives full of incident have not dented their appetite for us-against-the-world experience, even if slacks and slippers have taken the place of the Mary Quant dress.
Played with wit and grit by Denise Welch and Matthew Kelly, they are an abrasive double act, at once relishing and resenting their mutual dependency. Having landed in trendy Soho, their northern accents lending them kudos, they are ready to party but desperately in need of an income. They find it in upmarket sex work, Corral as the attractive good-time girl, Walter as the fastidious front-of-house man.
She calls him her maid or, in darker moments, a scrounger. He calls her a slut or, as John Lennon supposedly puts it, “the highly immoral Corral”.
The Gap is a comedy steeped in nostalgia. A sizeable chunk of the first half is given over to a list of every 60s player, from Francis Bacon to Joan Littlewood to the Krays, who form the backdrop of Corral and Walter’s hedonistic world. Yet something about the waspish performances and the playwright’s funny urban poetry prevents the play from becoming a wallow in the past. That is especially so in the riches-to-rags trajectory of the second half when it becomes a study of working-class expediency, the survival of two people who can only take each moment as it comes.
Not that Cartwright dwells too deeply. If you are looking for psychological reflections on the impact of sex work or the moral dilemmas of running off with a dodgy Maltese millionaire, this is not the play for you. Rather, in a playful production by Anthony Banks, it is brisk and lightweight with enough of an edge to let the actors show a range that goes from sweet to sour.
• At Hope Mill theatre, Manchester until 9 March
