YOU can always trust Jonathan Harvey to take apparently everyday life and create something that’s joyful yet sad, funny yet poignant and most definitely a bit bonkers.

In Corrie!, which premiered in Cambridge ahead of its run at the Empire Theatre this week, the Liverpool-born playwright has crammed 50 years of the ITV soap into a two-hour show.

Six actors divide up all the parts – some of the women are played by men in panto-style – and there’s a real life Coronation Star as the narrator.

It definitely helps to know at least a bit about the characters but you don’t have to be able to name every regular in the Rovers Return to enjoy the comic capering.

And even if you have followed every twist and turn of life on the cobbled street you’ll still be in for a surprise as well known plotlines are played out in unexpected fashion – the whole Tony Gordon saga is depicted as a ballet and last Christmas’s tram crash as a silent movie.

The opening scenes feel a little slow, reflecting the gentler pace of early Coronation Street episodes, but by the time Deirdre has denounced Ken as boring it’s rolling along faster than a Blackpool tram with Alan Bradley’s name on it.

The cast is extraordinary, switching from role to role with only seconds to spare. Leanne Best, who played Toinette in Roger McGough’s The Hypochondriac at the Liverpool Playhouse in 2009, makes a cracking Gail – all bouncy haired optimism as she tumbles from one disastrous love-affair to the next.

The only thing letting it down is the narrator part, which despite Gaynor Faye making a good stab at it in Cambridge, just didn’t have the same sparkle as the rest of the writing. Perhaps Ken Morley will be more successful in the Liverpool run.

Either way, it’s still worth skipping an episode of the soap to watch Corrie!