NORTHERN Exposure, the festival of new plays at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, granted three-week runs to Ugljesa Sajtinac's drama Huddersfield and Andrew G Marshall's Coming Around Again, but only four days to Mark Catley's Crap Dad. Crap decision, if you excuse the language.

Catley's Playhouse debut, Sunbeam Terrace, played to sell-out houses last year as he announced a new northern writing talent, distinctive yet reminiscent of Irvine Welsh, Joe Orton, John Godber and Andrea Dunbar. Catley had created such a frisson with that debut, Crap Dad surely warranted the lengthiest run.

Initially, the stage in Gail McIntyre's production is grey, like a moon-lit graveyard, but designer Emma Williams, who also designed Sunbeam Terrace, has a trick up her sleeve, working with video designer Mic Pool.

Images are beamed on to the set, turning for example a rock outcrop into a television. For each setting, a different set of images appears, instantly transforming the scene from sitting room to pub or school.

Such quick-fix scene-changing is a witty, time and labour-saving device that suits the high-voltage, high-speed structure of Catley's street dramas. It brings to mind the fast friction of Godber's early physical comedies.

Godber once said it is better to make an audience laugh and think, rather than merely laugh. That policy applies equally to Catley and his ballsy, rather than bolshy, writing.

He provides a Narrator (Ryan Simons), a 22-year-old version of lead character Paul, who tells the urban story in a shoulder-shrugging, hang-dog manner seven years into the future.

The present is seen in flashback, as the Narrator looks on like a one-man Greek chorus, commenting on his 15-year-old, bad-boy but latently intelligent schoolboy self, Young Paul (Luke Broughton) and his nascent relationship with the wild-child, Goth-Punk, bright and teacher-baiting Marie (Helen Turaya).

Into the mix come Paul's best friend, waster and school lunatic Shaun, New Age punk Digger and Paul's villainous dad, who is in prison (and deserves to be doing time for his dated opinions). The chameleon David Walker plays all three and assorted school mandarins besides.

As with Sunbeam Terrace, Catley addresses 'big' issues - teenage pregnancy, love tearing us apart, father-and-child relationships and feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing - while always having a knowing, anarchic eye to local comic colour.

The language is frank, the humour iconoclastic, and yet ultimately there is tenderness rather than anger in another corking play from Leeds' most promising new voice.

Updated: 09:52 Thursday, June 10, 2004