A tornado has torn through social services. Institutional furniture and personal files are strewn around crazily. A ribbon of ripped metal spirals precariously over the audience. Glaring down at it all is a giant, unblinking eyeball, creepily projected on to a suspended video screen the size of a bass drum - the eye of the storm.
Into this maelstrom come five whirling figures - three emotionally disturbed teenagers and the adults who care for them, although being cared for and being in care are entirely separate concepts. Lemn Sissay ought to know: he grew up in a children's home and this is the play that has been fighting to get out.
Sissay has claimed that he survived the system with only poetry to cling on to, and he writes as if words were one of the world's last precious resources. Every sentence is composed urgently, as though it could be the last. It makes for muscular self-expression, but just as poetry needs blank space on the page, a play-text needs a little room to breathe and expand. Sometimes Sissay's language becomes so tightly knotted that it is hard to unpick his meaning.
Maybe there is none. Storm is a central metaphor rather than a conventional narrative, and Sissay's comment that "nothing is straight in here, everything's twisted" is amply illustrated by John E McGrath's production. It creates the sense of the whole world having gone into spasm. Not only is the furniture folded at right angles, but the characters suddenly jerk and convulse mid-speech as if a live current has been tripped through the stage.
Sissay's text veers wildly from everyday chat to explosive interior monologues, and the young cast are generally more at ease spilling their metaphysical guts than asking one another if they want a cup of tea. The fact that the she-devils in overalls who run the home look barely older than their charges perhaps exposes a credibility gap.
But there are impassioned performances from Curtis Flowers and Danny J Burns as a pair of psychologically damaged reprobates, and an affectingly fragile contribution from Carla Henry as an unwanted waif who barely speaks. Strange how Sissay's most penetrative expression is silence.
· Until April 27. Box office: 0161-274 0600.
