They love girl gangs at the Royal Court. Rebecca Prichard's Yard Gal dealt with the leaders of a Hackney posse; now we have Kia Corthron's American equivalent, which takes us into the world of black Bronx teenagers. It's a much better play than the same writer's Splash Hatch on the E Going Down, which surfaced last year at the Donmar, and it's vigorously acted and directed, but Corthron still has a tendency to fall in love with her own dialogue.
The play's main plus is its extraordinary heroine: the cool, tough Prix, who at 16 is a female Capone effortlessly dominating her gang, and whose rise and fall we watch till she reaches 30. Prix is fixated by fireworks and power: she dispatches orders for killings, always received from an unseen Mr Big, with peremptory authority, yet she has a pyrotechnic obsession that leads her to sculpt fireworks out of multi-coloured pipecleaners.
Corthron remains intriguingly ambivalent about Prix. She shows her violence to stem, in part, from her domestic background: her common-law father beats her mother who, in turn, is driven to retaliatory killing. Prix is also the product of a culture in which male, middle-aged violence is either exculpated or seen as the social norm. But, just when you think Corthron is going soft on her heroine, she reminds you that she is an extremely cold fish: while in jail she rehearses a deeply sincere speech for the benefit of her captors - "my home was violent, my teachers suspicious, potential employers uninterested" - that she herself greets with derisive laughter.
Corthron pins down the mixed motives that drive teenage gangsters; she also shows how they are supplanted by even more ruthless successors. But, while Corthron brings Prix to vivid life, she too often lets her gift for language run away with her: a counselling session, for instance, spools on, adding sociological rather than dramatic information. She also provides a number of false endings so that the play constantly seems to be reaching a climax.
Indeed, my one criticism of Gemma Bodinetz's excellent production, which I saw at a last preview in the handsomely restored Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, is that it treats Prix's park-square Fourth of July firework display too much as a climactic spectacle. Otherwise everything reeks of authenticity and Diane Parish's Prix is eye-opening: I've rarely seen such gimlet-eyed authority in a young actress. Marsha Thomason as a suicide-prone cellmate, Rakie Ayola as a terrified gang member and Adjoa Andoh as Prix's mother lend striking support in a play that takes you behind the headlines to examine a disturbing social phenomenon with unblinking honesty.
Until March 11. Box office: 0171-565 5000.
