Port, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

Simon Stephens' Port scored a big hit with the teenagers sitting behind me. It was a genuine example of spontaneous appreciation as they giggled, gasped, groaned and identified with the events on stage. As a lesson in how to engage young people's attention, Port is a model of its kind, but it probably won't feature on the "must see" list in tourism guides of Stockport where Stephens grew up to become a writer-in-residence at the Royal Exchange, where Marianne Elliott has directed his latest play.

Rachel Keats (aged 11 to 24) hates Stockport vehemently. It's always raining, "it's fucking cheap, grotty, shit buildings, stinks" and her dad's "dead mental". Before very long, Mum has done a runner, granddad has died and her brother's into nicking. Her own life looks as if it, too, could drift into pieces. Remarkably and heartwarmingly, it doesn't (completely) – thanks to her optimism and distinctive brand of savvy – as she goes through the uncertainties of adolescence, a "convenient" marriage and disappointment in what the future has so far held in store.

On stage the whole time, and pivotal in each of the play's seven scenes, Emma Lowndes is stunning as Rachel, achieving a remarkable transformation from a skinny 11-year-old and an awkward teenager to a sadder, wiser, but no less attractive, 24-year-old. Andrew Sheridan draws a tangible thread through the stages of her brother Billy's life, and the supporting roles are taken well, particularly William Ash as Danny.

The absence of the almost statutory undercurrent of sexual abuse in a play about young people whose lives are messed up is refreshing. I suspect I wasn't the only one who thought briefly that incest might be on the agenda when Rachel appeared to be sharing a bedroom with her dad, his character doubled by the actor (Nicholas Sidi) playing her equally unsympathetic husband. Ian Dickinson's choice of rave music by Manchester bands from 1988 to 2002 spans the years we live through with Rachel on Rae Smith's cleverly versatile set. Striking for its oh-so-dull representation of a hospital café, rain-splattered bus shelter, supermarket, and dreary hotel room, the round space easily accommodates the battered Vauxhall Cavalier in which the play begins, dismally, and ends, perhaps hopefully. This somewhat ambiguous quality could be a shortcoming – once started how to end? But Port is by no means grim, thanks to Stephens' not unpoetic portrayal of the harshness and hope that colour so many children's lives, his sensitivity and acute observation of the coded signals, language and mannerisms that young people adopt to survive.

To 30 Nov (0161-833 9833)