In Liverpool the production of dramatists is virtually a light industry. But although the latest off the assembly line, Dameon Garnett, writes lively dialogue, his debut piece turns out to be two plays in one. It starts out as a louche version of The Liver Birds and ends up as Educating Rita.
The first, chirpier, half is full of jokes, rows and four-letter words as two Speke teenagers, Barbie-Jean and Stella, are invited by the former's Auntie Pauline for a caravan holiday in Torquay. You know it's a Liverpool play by the fact that everyone talks like a comedian. Asked by her dad the name of the Wilde play she's studying for A-Level, Barbie-Jean announces it "Lady Fandermere's Wind." And when she tells him it's paradoxical, he says: "Isn't that when a tart dyes her hair blonde?"
But, after tickling our ribs in the first half, Garnett turns all serious on us in the second by showing Barbie-Jean rejecting her coarse background to study for university. The change of tone is fine, but there is something depressingly negative about Garnett's assumption that Barbie-Jean's educational conversion is tied up with her failures with fellas. The big scene in which the foul-mouthed Auntie Pauline rails at her niece for betraying her working-class roots feels oddly dated: you would think no one from Liverpool had ever been to university.
It's a ramshackle play full of loose ends but it has enough rude vitality to make one hope for better things to come. And Claire Lovett's production is more than decently acted. Claire Sundin's Barbie-Jean, moping in Torquay, is vocally full of the last of the summer whine. Tina Malone as Pauline conveys an edgy vindictiveness under the barrel of working-class fun. And Emily Norman decorously suggests that Stella is both posh totty and, in her friend's phrase, "the sexual equivalent of a combine harvester". Even if watching the play is like being bashed over the head with a stick of seaside rock, you can't deny Garnett's bruising energy.
· Until March 26. Box office: 020-7373 3842.
