At the beginning of Robert Holman's quietly seismic new play adults refuse to talk directly to each other but converse through a third party. The channels of communication have broken down through intransigence, sheer bloody-mindedness and despair. They are not having a conversation but constructing brick walls around themselves and using words as weapons. The end of the play brings a mirror image: three damaged teenagers talk through each other. It is exactly the same device, yet in this instance the conversation is inclusive rather than an attempt to keep things at bay. These young people, against all the odds, are prepared to let their defences down enough to allow friendship, love and compassion into their lives.
When it comes to optimism, Holman is a writer who, like Edward Bond, offers the tiniest gestures of hope. There are two worlds sitting side by side in Holes in the Skin. By the end there is a rickety, roughly hewn bridge between them. The first world is that of lippy 15-year-old Kerry, unhappily living with her feckless, sad mother, little more than a child herself, and her mother's latest boyfriend, Dennis, who fast proves himself a menace with fantasies of teenage girls' white panties. When Kerry tells the troubled Lee, who has spent four years in a young offenders' unit for pushing a boy off a wall, and his drug-dealing, bully-boy brother Ewan that she would like Dennis to have a little accident, she does not think of the consequences.
The second world portrayed is a sunlit walled garden with an apple tree, a place where cool lemonade is drunk and where Freya lives openly and lovingly with her father who is also the father of her son Dominic, a 21-year-old with learning difficulties. Dominic's best friend, is Lee and this mutually supportive relationship is a haven for both boys.
Holman's play is a deeply unfashionable piece of writing, and all power to Chichester's new regime for daring to be different. It is reflective rather than flashy or punchy, taking over three and a half hours to grow its story. Those things do not make it chic but they do make a marvellously mature and dramatically engrossing investigation into responsibility, the way that nobody's life is completely their own but always touches upon others', and how if you refuse contact with others you seal yourself in a ghetto of lovelessness, prejudice and ignorance. Simon Usher's production bravely refuses to hurry things, and the acting, particularly from Sarah Cattle as Kerry, burns white hot.
· Until September 20. Box office: 01243 781312.
