A Clockwork Orange @ The Lowry, Salford

We all know Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, mainly for its necessary glossary and Malcolm McDowell’s insane glare – but rape, ultra-violence and oft-impenetrable Nadsat sound like a difficult combination to achieve in front of a live audience. Presumably it would end in people either vomiting or missing all the nuances.

Theatre company Action To The Word have had a go anyway, and the results are mixed. Most of the time, it’s quite clever, and the cast are indeed, as the novel has them, ‘young, bold [and] vicious’ – but it’s lacking in menace pretty much throughout, which is surely its key ingredient, aside from milk.

It’s inescapable that Alex and his Droogs look an awful lot like a boyband at times, and the bursts of music and dance are a bit, well, naff. Hearing Gossip’s Standing in the Way of Control played over a slow-motion fight scene is a low point – we aren't sitting in the middle of an indie disco, but it certainly feels like it. The fight scenes themselves, soundtrack aside, are heavily choreographed and that's not necessarily to their benefit. While it's nice to see some balletic poise in the midst of all the hooliganism, and though the cast are undeniably great dancers to watch, it feels out of place. It's more like A Clockwork Orange: The Musical, with huge chunks stolen from West Side Story.

On the other hand, Adam Search is a tremendously charismatic Alex DeLarge, and the whole company are glorious together, especially in the prison scenes, where their comic timing is close to perfect. The play has a weak start, but a strong middle, and the key to that is the cast interaction. Their interplay, the way they change accents and guises and transform themselves with just an orange tie, is remarkably good. As a troupe, they work as one, and are fascinating to watch.

There were so many things to like things about this play: the milk carton attached to a Droog’s belt; Damien Hasson’s Deltoid; Search’s afflicted and supposedly ‘cured’ DeLarge; the cast’s complete lack of pretension... it goes on. But the disappointment remains, and the ending is so flat it doesn’t even fizzle out, just stops dead, taking a moralistic turn and ending up crude and ineffective. [Helen McCarthy]