Here comes everybody All the world and his wife

Bryony Lavery's Goliath acknowledged two big debts. The matter is mostly drawn from Beatrix Campbell's forceful book of the same name about the riots that flared up at the end of the summer of 1991 on estates in Cardiff, Oxford and Tyneside. The manner is derived from the solo shows of Anna Deavere Smith, an American who has combined the roles of investigative journalist and virtuoso performer in pieces that have presented the LA riots or, in Fires in the Mirror, the 1991 unrest between blacks and Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn Heights through a collage of verbatim voices.

There's a risk with shows like this that they will come across as uncomfortably convenient display cases for the actor's identity-swapping skills and repertoire of accents. It occurred to me watching Fires in the Mirror that just about the only category of person Ms Smith had failed to interview and portray was the kind that hangs round riots collecting material for solo shows. The glory of Nichola McAuliffe's performance - or, rather, myriad performances, in this compelling Annie Castledine production of Goliath - is the completely unselfserving spirit with which she brings the play's various worlds alive.

The piece begins from a jolting, out-of-body perspective as a Geordie joy-rider describes, with a grotesquely tragicomic mixture of exultancy and fascinated horror, the circumstances of his own death in a police chase. Like a suddenly unstrung puppet, McAuliffe's body flops down over the spiral staircase through which she is entwined. From then on, to the sounds of smashing glass and roaring sirens, we are in the thick of it - the working-class estates written off by Thatcherism, places where the dictionary definition of a riot as a collective disturbance for a common purpose had to be redrafted. Here, as often as not, the impotent community's rage had turned inward against itself.

Gangland rap is not a mode that seems to come naturally to Ms McAuliffe, but the rest of her impersonations are vividly convincing. One moment, she's a hunched, softly spoken Welsh-Pakistani shopkeeper hounded from his home and business in a trading dispute's violent aftermath, which it suited the police to regard as entirely non-racist in feeling. The next, she's taking you into the sheer visceral elation of a Blackbird Leys joy-rider - the kind of youth who might once have expected to work, as his father did, in the local car factory.

The women bear the worst burden, attempting to set up self-help community schemes and children's playgrounds that fall foul of the male criminality the times have fostered. There's the quietly desolating case of the Tyneside mother who had to grass on her son because it was the only way she knew of getting him help. The travails of these beautifully characterised women find a counterpart in the complaint of a no-nonsense female police officer who observes that there is often little to choose, aggression-wise, between the new recruits to the force and the young men they are sent out to tame.

Designed by Kendra Ullyart, the show takes place in a run-down glass conservatory. To contrast English myth and debased reality, ironic (if rather predictable) use is made of "Land of Hope and Glory", Vaughan Williams and a voice-over of John of Gaunt's "this sceptred isle" speech. For "sceptred", read "septic". But what is ultimately heartening about the show is the moral implication of its format: one woman, who happens to be an extremely accomplished actress, endeavouring to transcend division by speaking on behalf of everybody.

To 16 Aug (Booking: 0181-743 3388) Paul Taylor