Magical trip to joys and fears of teenage years

YOU CAN SEE THE HILLS (Royal Exchange Studio, Manchester)

DOES posterity work like statistical charts, where the best and worst results are discarded and the ones in the middle are considered about right?

I should hate it if my suggestion that Oldham writer Matthew Dunster’s new play is the most amazing thing I’ve seen all year were dismissed because I’ve been watching his work pretty much since he was the schoolboy this play recalls, and I’m partisan.

When I say the play — and Oldham actor Will Ash’s equally extraordinary feat of memory and performance in playing it — made me smile, cringe, laugh and even brought a lump to my throat, it was all part of the magic — that’s probably the right word — of the experience.

The piece ventures into the territory Alan Bennett has made famous: that of the dramatic monologue. Bennett’s “Talking Heads” spread over several one-hour works; Dunster gives us just one, stretching over two hours.

In lesser hands it could seem a bum-numbing conceit, but is perhaps only 10 minutes too long, and they are minutes easily forgiven.

For what we get is a story of youth among ordinary Oldham teenagers that touches, saddens, makes you laugh and brings a welling to your eyes: a story of such tremendous detail that you knew these kids; they were your own friends.

Matthew’s talent is to make the mundane profound. Comic fumblings and friendships turn in an instant to easy tragedy; a handful of young lives become the lives of all teenagers, with their joys, fears and discoveries.

Ash does a remarkable job of negotiating things with a smile, a turn of the head or a step change in his body language — not at all easy when you are simply sitting and talking.

And there’s sex, too; quite a lot of talking about it. But that’s teenagers for you...

The monologue is simply about discovery. As Ash brilliantly, matter-of-factly and entertainingly relates half a dozen episodes from a teenage boy’s sordid, disgusting, comedy-filled, uneasily-negotiated, tragedy-touched and ultimately rather noble life, it is the writer’s own teenage voyage — names mucked about with to protect the guilty — that is laid bare.

It was a voyage, in Matthew’s case, that ended with him heading away from Oldham to his metaphorical hills and adulthood. It happens to us all.

Go and see it, and I promise it will all come flooding back.