Our Friends in the North Returns to the Stage in Newcastle

Peter Flannery's Our Friends in the North, the landmark nine-episode BBC Two drama first broadcast in 1996, is being reworked for the stage at Newcastle upon Tyne's Live Theatre.

In a rehearsal room at the top of the venue, four actors are bringing to life the principal characters from one of British television's best-loved dramas. Around a table strewn with coffee cups, water bottles and annotated scripts, Tosker and Geordie have been boozing in a nightclub and weighing up their chances of pulling. Mary and Nicky have been arguing about whether they have a future together.

The original series was set against a backdrop of Labour politics and police corruption, charting 30 years in the lives of four working-class Geordies. It made stars of Mark Strong, Daniel Craig, Gina McKee and Christopher Eccleston. It was a hit with critics and viewers, won awards and regularly makes "greatest ever" lists.

Why revive it now, 30 years on?

The title of the original report poses the question bluntly: "Corruption has only got worse." Flannery's drama built its reputation on themes of scandal and decay, and the new production's director and cast have been talking about doing justice to those themes for a contemporary audience.

The staging returns the story to the city that shaped it. Newcastle's Live Theatre, a small venue at the heart of the production, replaces the television screen's sweep with the intimacy of four actors around a table — the format in which the characters' friendships, arguments and betrayals are being reanimated.

What made the original a landmark?

The 1996 series compressed three decades of British political and social history into nine episodes. Its subjects — Labour Party machinations and police corruption — gave the four friends' personal stories a public edge.

Its casting became legendary. Mark Strong, Daniel Craig, Gina McKee and Christopher Eccleston all went on to major careers after the series aired. The new cast faces the explicit challenge of emulating those star-making performances while making the roles their own.

Can the stage version still shock?

That is the question the makers have set themselves. A drama that once exposed corruption and decay now plays to audiences who, in the words of the report's headline, have watched that corruption "only get worse" in the three decades since broadcast.

The production's answer lies in specificity rather than nostalgia: the nightclub boozing, the couple's quarrel about their future, the working-class Geordie voices — scenes rehearsed not as period pieces but as live arguments.

If the stage version sustains the original's critical and popular impact — the awards, the "greatest ever" listings, the star-making cast — it will give Newcastle a claim on a story that television made famous, and give audiences a chance to test whether Flannery's themes still cut.