Write what you know is supposed to be the mantra for emerging writers: it’s certainly worked well enough for Paddy Campbell, whose remarkable 2013 debut Wet House drew on his first-hand experience of working in a hostel for homeless alcoholics. Now he’s produced a follow-up based on his current day job in a children’s care home.
Creating a play specifically for Live’s Youth Theatre may seem like only a modest advance, but it confirms that Campbell is the real deal – a young playwright whose eye, ear and empathy for the under-privileged is blisteringly funny and bitingly real.
Thirteen-year-old Liam is the kind of semi-feral, self-destructive trouble magnet who drives his mum and social worker beyond despair. But whereas others might see only a case study, Campbell finds a sweet-hearted, vulnerable, charmingly amusing little boy. To say that 14-year-old Kalem Patterson gives a performance beyond his years in Paul James’s production is a little misleading, as he barely seems a day over 12. But he already has the comic timing you simply can’t teach, and Campbell consistently feeds him great lines, such as when he complains about the stigma of attending a special unit: “You’ve got predictions for GCSE’s. All we do is play snap and make bird tables.”
Tezney Mulroy is equally assured as Liam’s less-wayward older sibling; as is Sophie Pitches, who plays a fugitive from a posh girls’ grammar with whom he camps out in a leisure-centre toilet, which shows that children from affluent families sometimes need protection as well. If Campbell can continue this run of form it may not be long before he can give up the day job. Yet one cannot help feeling that it might be slightly disappointing if he did: because though he is clearly an exceptional playwright, he must be a bloody good social worker as well.
• Until 11 April. Box office: 0191-232 1232. Venue: Live theatre, Newcastle.
