Children of the Night review – party like it’s 1997 in Yorkshire’s Vegas
If you walk down Doncaster’s Duke Street today, you will see no sign of the old Karisma club, with its sunburst frontage and exhausting staircase. Long since converted into shops and then flats, it had a magnetic appeal to a generation of 1990s clubbers whose desire for dancefloor escape justified their queuing for an hour (excepting those who had finessed the art of snogging their way to the front).
The Coach and Horses is still up the road, though, as is a town centre that revels in a hedonistic spirit more commonly associated with Magaluf. It is, as Danielle Phillips’s lively play has it, "Yorkshire’s very own Vegas". The reason for that lies in the town’s proximity to a score of mining villages.
Doncaster is where working-class revellers have traditionally gravitated – and continue to do so long after Margaret Thatcher’s assault on the coal industry robbed the area of its economic heart.
England, Doncaster
doncaster, duke street, karisma, yorkshire, vegas, danielle phillips, 1990s, clubbers, mining villages, margaret thatcher