I EXPECTED to be completely blown away by Victory Street and, instead, I left the Lowry completely deflated.

Visually, this production by the National Youth Theatre couldn't be any better, but the story is predictable and the characters never transcend the stereotype.

We're in a fictitious northern town and the racial tension between the white and Asian communities is simmering, until, eventually, it reaches boiling point.

Ellie, the central character, is a bright 15-year-old who dreams about becoming a writer.

She also has an Asian boyfriend and this makes her the target of hostility from both sides of the racial divide.

While Emma Whitaker is fabulous as Ellie you never really care that much about what happens to her, even though you can't help but admire the way she's there for her younger brother, who has Down's Syndrome, when her tart of a mother most definitely isn't.

Nabil Aziz is good as Muzz, her boyfriend, and Sam McAvoy certainly convinces as Ellie's little brother Matty, turning to his big sister for the TLC he doesn't get from a mother who drinks like a fish and sleeps with anything in trousers.

The problem with Victory Street, based on the novel by Richard MacSween, is that it doesn't really tells us anything new about the difficult subject of racial hatred.

It even makes the point that we, as human beings, never learn from the past, with MacSween harking back to the Nazi era. We never learn from the past. You DON'T say!

Issues as serious as racial hatred deserved to be handled better than this and I can't help feeling that this Victory Street, which for me should be re-named Cliché Street, is an opportunity missed.

However, I do feel that, in Emma Whitaker, I saw a star of the future, which made my trip to the Lowry, on a freezing October night, almost worthwhile.

  • Until October 27. The box office is on 0870 111 2000.