Stage review: Crongton Knights, York Theatre Royal

Crongton Knights follows the company’s slick staging of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses and it is equally ambitious in its targeting of a teen audience.

Here it’s the music that lifts Alex Wheatle’s superficially simple story from the page, with the very traditional surrounds of York Theatre Royal rattling to a beatbox soundscape for much of the two hours.

The only problem is that to get the phone they have to cross into Notre Dame, a notorious gangland estate and do so armed only with their bus fare home and a packet of biscuits.

There is an energy to this production which is infectious and the clever staging, centred on a graffiti-covered set of steps, ensures the pace never dips. There are a few rough edges though.

Lines are occasionally stumbled over rather than delivered and more polished storytelling would have prevented key plot moments being lost beneath Conrad Murray’s accomplished musical score.

York, like many theatres, has a white, middle-class, middle-aged demographic. For Crongton Knights the average age dropped significantly, but the diversity of the cast sadly wasn’t reflected in the auditorium.

Still, if Pilot keeps staging the kind of work it does, the audience will no doubt come.

To February 29.

THREE STARS