Have you noticed how popular science is currently invading personal dramas? Exactly like Charlotte Jones in Humble Boy, Emma Frost in Airsick uses the black hole theory to reinforce her characters' sense of disintegration. But in the end, it is not so much Frost's views on gravitational collapse as her understanding of female dilemmas that makes this a promising first play.
Frost presents us with two women in their early 30s, both struggling to make sense of their lives. Lucy is a modestly successful artist encumbered with a drunken, hypochondriac father and an uncaring American boyfriend. Her problem is that she is increasingly drawn to a drifting New Zealander whose charm, along with much else, proves infectious. Meanwhile, her scatty chum Scarlet leaps from bed to bed with a promiscuous insouciance somewhat undermined by her revelations of childhood abuse.
In the course of the play, Frost seems to be having it both ways: suggesting in a Larkinesque way that women are fucked up by their parents, fathers especially, but that they also choose their own destruction. Although I found her ideas contradictory, I was impressed by her grasp of emotional specifics. There's an authentically dreadful dinner party where Lucy, embarrassed to her roots by her confessional dad, finds her boyfriend bonding with the old monster.
And Scarlet, in a series of astonishingly candid monologues, reveals both her post-coital contempt for the men she's had, and her awareness of the "bitter blackness" at her core.
This is not the whole truth about sex. But Frost writes convincingly about the desperation of modern women, torn between hunger for permanence and rejection of domestic bliss, and of the universal fear that we are haunted by our genetic past. Although she's worked mainly in television, she also exploits theatre's capacity for direct address and metaphorical potential. Es Devlin's set has a fluorescent back wall implying hypothetical astronomical systems and Mike Bradwell's production gets strikingly good performances from Celia Robertson as the self-doubting, love-lorn Lucy and from Susannah Doyle as the defiantly damaged Scarlet. Promising enough to make you hope for a recurring Frost.
· At the Drum Theatre, Plymouth, until November 8. Box office: 020-7610 4224.
