THIS is a kitchen-sink drama with a nasty secret and a devil-like charmer right at it’s centre.

Think of those classic 1950s and 1960s British working-class films like A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night Sunday Morning with their small, drab rooms bursting with human passion and you get an idea of the feel.

In fact, the play is set in a small, half-decorated, impoverished kitchen and is about relationships in a family with no money. But the kitchen-sink, Love on the Dole inspiration only tells you half the story. It’s more like Dracula has accidentally found himself in Coronation Street and decided to cause mayhem. Young couple Chris and his pregnant wife, Dawn, are on the dole, but both want more. It’s a desperate situation until a sharp-suited stranger, the guest, offers Chris a well-paid job. What that job entails is the secret at the heart of the play.

There’s only three hardworking, believable actors in what is an intense play. There are things to say about what people will do for love, for ambition, for escape and the anger that lies below the surface in hard-pressed families. The message was all the more powerful thanks to the actors’ local accents. No one in the audience, filling the small theatre on the top floor of the Arc, could have failed to know there were couples just like Chris and Dawn living a few minutes’ walk away.

A new piece of writing by Scott Young, the play was produced by Tees Valley theatre company OddManOut. It will be performed again tonight at Washington Arts Centre. Recommended.