There are some pretty mixed-up people in the northern towns, where the old industries have disappeared and unemployment would be high even without a recession. There are also plenty of cross-cultural relationships in towns where an influx of Asian people means that there is quite a racial mix. The moral and intellectual strength of Robin Soans’s ambiguously titled Mixed up North (a touring production from Out of Joint), though perhaps also its dramatic weakness, is that the author sees the complexities of life in places that southerners tend to regard as faintly barbaric but happily distant.

He sets the play in a drama club for young people in Burnley, Lancashire, the town where the BNP has councillors, influence and, according to my internet research, a semi-secret office for Nick Griffin MEP. A cast of whites and Asians are rehearsing a Bollywood spoof that threatens to collapse when the lead, who is of Bangladeshi origin, is persuaded to flounce out by his Anglo girlfriend. This bothers Celia Imrie’s Trish, the benign but tough youth worker organising the production, but is of very little moment since it’s the offstage dialogue that gives Mixed up North its point. And that’s to examine issues that surfaced during and after the riots of 2001 and to listen to voices not often heard in newspapers, the theatre, anywhere.

The result isn’t exactly verbatim drama, a genre that Soans recently exploited to good effect in his literally titled Talking to Terrorists. What he learnt from interviews in Burnley has clearly been fictionalised, yet Max Stafford-Clark’s gifted young cast bring real power to first-person accounts of an arranged marriage that wasn’t wanted yet somehow succeeded, the rape of a vulnerable girl by a white hooligan and the grooming and destruction of a teenager by an Asian businessman. And the often heated discussion raises subjects that range from clashes between Asian generations to those riots, which are seen less as racial warring than as a protest by both sides of the ethnic divide against boredom, a dwindling job market and the police.

With a bureaucrat arriving to demand that everyone keeps quiet about such problems “to improve Burnley’s image”, Soans’s conclusion is that there are no easy conclusions. The result is a play that’s overlong, disorganised, a bit didactic yet always lively — and, at a time when immigration is so high on the Government’s agenda, burningly topical.

Box office: 020-7452 3000.

To December 5

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