Bintou is 13 and is all mouth and provocation. A dangerous free spirit, who would make Lulu seem tame. She doesn't wear knickers and she doesn't go to school. Instead she grows like a wild flower on Paris's poor, violent suburban byways, always one step ahead of her "three crazy kings", a trio of teenage boys who are in thrall to her.
What Bintou probably needs is an understanding social worker. What she has is a despairing mother, an unemployed father who has given up on her and on life, a lascivious uncle who watches her every move and a jealous aunt who calls Bintou a "slut", "blasphemer" and "witch", and who stokes the fires of superstition and African tradition, with tragic consequences.
Koffi Kwahule's searing account of teenage nihilism and despair is a short, sharp shocker that captures all the deranged logic of damaged children let loose in an adult world of drugs, violence and sex. It moves towards its climax with a growing sense of doom that makes your heart thump painfully in your chest.
Kwahule's drama could seem slight, but director Sacha Wares matches the author's ragged, raw, poetic prose (beautifully translated by John Clifford) with an exhilarating, canny production that has all the dangerous edge and atmosphere of a teenage joyride through life's more lethal highways. Using mirrors and a series of separate stages in the Arcola's garage-like studio space, Wares conjures up the wire of the playground, the burned-out cars, the streets where Bintou and her friends run, and the domestic spaces where parents hopelessly try to confine their children.
The young cast are terrific, too, giving performances that are unleashed and completely natural, particularly Akiya Henry as the knowing Bintou, and Ashley Miller as the drug-addicted P'tit Jean, who recognises himself in Bintou and who destroys the thing he loves. This is an evening that gives you back your faith in the London fringe and reminds you why the Arcola, under its clever director-producer Mehmet Ergen, is becoming one of the most essential theatres in the capital.
· Until August 17. Box office: 020-7503 1646.
