TADCASTER playwright and broadcaster Ray Brown and first-generation Jamaican immigrant Alfred Williams were friends for 16 years in Kirkstall, swapping words of wisdom in Ray's kitchen or at Alfred's allotments by the railway line.

Living Pretty is Brown's affectionate portrait of Alfred's life of struggle in the West Indies and in Leeds after his arrival on the promise of milk and honey in the mother country in the 1950s.

That life story is condensed into 65 minutes in a one-man show performed by Leeds actor Everal A Walsh, with sweetly sonorous, coquettish feminine assistance from singer Pauline Tomlin. Walsh plays Alfred from the age of six to 79 with humour, dignity, joy and sadness, while Pauline takes some shut eye in the afternoon sun and breaks into brief bursts of field songs to link vignettes and monologues.

Symbolically, the play grows from small seeds. Walking stiffly to his allotment wooden table and battered chair, amid bird song and tolling church bells, Walsh's tall and willowy Alfred plants "just a couple a'row" of broad bean seeds. These will grow, in Alfred's favourite description, "big and pretty". Hence the play's title.

Alfred pours himself a cup of cold tea from his flask, and as Tomlin awakens into song, he is transported back to impoverished days of skipping school, flogging and hard toil on his father's tenant farm, days too busy to learn to read or write. Walsh's body changes from stiff to gangly child and, later, by simply turning his flat cap around he becomes a truculent teen, Tomlin amusingly sidling up beside him with eye-fluttering intent, as the latest distraction to keep him from his studies.

The story progresses through Alfred's years as a tenant farmer, saving money to come to England, and onwards to his decade as the one black man in the Canada Dry workforce in Leeds. No one asked his name, instead calling him George after Chicken George in Roots, the television series of the time. He didn't mind, taking in his stride whatever cards were dealt him.

He recalls his first taste of snow, soft and clear at first, hard and cold and mucky by the next morning: a microcosm of his experiences. Spend an hour in Alfred's allotment of memories and you learn much about life's seasons.

Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 10:48 Friday, April 15, 2005