Children of the Night review – party like it’s 1997 in Yorkshire’s Vegas

. UK edition

Danielle Phillips in Children of the Night.
Brassy confidence … Danielle Phillips in Children of the Night. Photograph: Marc Brenner

Through the eyes of two working-class teenagers, a legendary 90s Doncaster nightclub is brought back to life in Danielle Phillips’s sparky but quietly perceptive play

If you walk down Doncaster’s Duke Street today, you will see no sign of the old Karisma club, with its sunburst frontage and exhausting staircase. Long since converted into shops and then flats, it had a magnetic appeal to a generation of 1990s clubbers whose desire for dancefloor escape justified their queuing for an hour (excepting those who had finessed the art of snogging their way to the front).

The Coach and Horses is still up the road, though, as is a town centre that revels in a hedonistic spirit more commonly associated with Magaluf. It is, as Danielle Phillips’s lively play has it, “Yorkshire’s very own Vegas”.

The reason for that lies in the town’s proximity to a score of mining villages. Doncaster is where working-class revellers have traditionally gravitated – and continue to do so long after Margaret Thatcher’s assault on the coal industry robbed the area of its economic heart.

This is a seam that runs just beneath the surface of Children of the Night which, inspired by interviews with Karisma regulars, is both a celebration of teenage exuberance and a reflection on the social forces shaping popular culture. Writing in a spirited urban poetry – and performing with a brassy confidence – Phillips takes us to a 1997 when the Tories have been kicked out, Robbie Williams has released his first solo LP and the UK has won Eurovision with Love Shine a Light.

Things can only get better and, as two best friends, Lindsay and Jen, make their debut at Karisma (Phillips joined by an equally fizzy Charlotte Brown), the force of DJ Don’s bass heightens the pleasures of dance, drink and debauchery. Darkening the mood in the years to come are a cluster of HIV cases and Lindsay’s kindly father (Gareth Radcliffe) suffering cerebral hypoxia, a consequence of his time down the mines.

The pacy staging by Kimberley Sykes for Mad Friday Productions is at its zingiest at the start, when references to Mothercare corner and Biscuit Billy’s score laughs of recognition from the home crowd. Later scenes lose some of that spark, but it remains a quietly perceptive account of working-class female experience.