Becky Chapman is 17 and has everything to live for. She does a double act with her stand-up comedian dad, Mike, and he is certain that she has got the talent to make it as a singer on her own. Then, just when she is about to go solo, she becomes moody and starts falling over. Almost overnight she turns from a sparky teenager into a dribbling wreck. Variant CJD is destroying her brain and it is going to destroy her happy family too.
Inspired by the true story of Rachel Forber, this is a harrowing and heartbreaking tale of lives wrecked by a government more concerned with protecting farming and business interests than making public the research of scientists who were increasingly convinced that BSE in cattle posed serious health risks to the population. It is an evening that makes you so indignant, you feel like rushing out of the theatre, seeking out John Selwyn Gummer and shoving a beefburger down his throat.
The show is quietly moving in its depiction of the Chapman family and in particular of Mike: he is presented with enormous sympathy, but he is never the heroic father of Hollywood myths who refuses to give up on his dying child. On the contrary, he is wonderfully and pitifully human as he tells terrible, politically incorrect jokes and displays a pigheadedness in his determination to keep Becky alive, however great her suffering.
The human interest aspect of the show is strongly written, but the evening tries too hard to be two plays in one. The factual element of the story is clumsily handled, with far too much reliance on exposition. But it is heavy stuff, full of ordinary heroes and a wide array of villains - dissembling politicians and self-serving scientists and journalists - and the story is a sharp reminder of moment when many of us lost our innocence and really stopped believing what governments told us.
· Until March 5. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
