Doormen are on duty in Harrogate and not only outside the clubs reports Charles Hutchinson.

ONCE upon a picture postcard, Parliament Street was the plushest of Harrogate streets, all haute couture, Turkish baths and elegance.

The chic clothes and the bath robes remain, but the doormen have taken up their nocturnal posts, a signal that bar and club culture has arrived, boozed up and sexed up for the weekend.

From tonight, doormen will be posted at Harrogate Theatre too, prowling the bars and keeping order, not because the old spa town's night-time behaviour is plummeting to new depths but because John Godber's Bouncers team are on duty.

Artistic director Hannah Chissick has picked this comic tale of the four horsemen of the clubbing apocalypse as her second Godber production at Harrogate.

"I decided to do it because I've done quite a few Godber plays in the past and bizarrely I haven't done this one: bizarre because Bouncers is the best known," she says.

"Teechers did so well here in 2003 that I wanted to bring Godber back quickly, and it made sense to do this play next, which kind of thematically moves on from the schooldays of Teechers to young people going clubbing.

"Teechers was set in the 1980s and was done here when there was an Eighties' revival going on. Bouncers will be set in the Nineties with lots of big Nineties' tracks."

The changing face of Harrogate at night makes Hannah's production all the more topical.

"People's perception of Harrogate is that it's a sleepy, nice town but there's a youth culture here that's quite prevalent.

"I'm really interested in what happens in Harrogate on a Friday night.

"From six to eight, it's dead, the lull before the storm, and then by nine, there's a whole swarm that's come in," she says.

"What with all the focus on binge-drinking and 24-hour opening, it's a buzzy thing that everyone's talking about at the moment."

Parliament Street's bars may be magnets expressly for the beer-and-leer youth market and those still chasing skirt and lost youth, but Hannah believes Bouncers has broader appeal.

"If someone asks 'Who's this play for?', I say 'Anyone who's been on a night out, either the life you're leading now, or the life you used to lead'. The music changes but the ritual of boy meets girl doesn't change," she says.

"Bouncers is a play about the rites of passage, and they don't just happen when you're 18.

The girls are trying to negotiate their relationships with men; the boys are going through that change from boys into men, and the bouncers are coming to terms with their feelings about their jobs, their lives and their future. They're all looking for something."

Working with an all-male cast (the bouncers play the lads and lasses too), Hannah has brought a female perspective to the production.

"We had two very interesting days where we each talked about our best and worst clubbing experiences," she says. "I couldn't possibly say what my worst night was - we're all sworn to secrecy!"

Bouncers, Harrogate Theatre, until March 5. Box office: 01423 502116.

Updated: 15:42 Thursday, February 10, 2005