Shy Adam and beautiful Eve are two 15-year-olds, but the Middlesbrough housing estate where they live is no paradise, although it has plenty of its own temptations in sex and drugs. But the temptations come with consequences: vomiting up your tea, being raped while you are insensible, unwanted pregnancy and being bottled by the macho Gary in a jealous rage. Home life is no better: Adam has OCD and a violent dad, and Eve's mum is dying of lung cancer, something that she tries to forget in a haze of drugs and one-night stands.
Despite all the downers, this superb stage version of Richard Milward's debut novel, written from the heart when he was 19, is – like an underage Trainspotting – an upbeat and sometimes even joyous affair that suggests that for all the trials and tribulations of the teenage years, the kids are probably going to be OK. John Retallack's adaptation for Company of Angels makes a dramatic virtue of Milward's monologist strengths, in which realism and surrealism meet head-on so that even a sperm swimming to an egg and a butterfly get to comment wryly on the proceedings.
It's shocking stuff, but it never feels gratuitous, and the characters are so fully formed, and every one of them has such a distinctive voice, that you feel as if you've known them since they were babes. It's a funny-sad, ugly-beautiful night out, nicely performed by its young cast and swirling with the sweaty, dirty poetry of everyday life.
