Anna Russell-Martin doesn’t crack a smile. Playing Anais Hendricks, the 15-year-old resident of a Midlothian care home, she is stony-faced, laser-eyed and sour. “That’s a pretty grimace you’ve got there,” says Louise McMenemy as fellow resident Shortie, knowing a grimace is as good as she’ll get.
Anais sneers back. She is a product of a system that has taught her neither to trust nor give ground. Her voice prowls round the bass notes, assertive, sharp, ever ready to strike. It would scare you to meet her.
Yet she is funny and intelligent, too, this child who has clocked up as many institutions as she has police convictions. Never off the stage in Jenni Fagan’s faithful adaptation of her own excellent novel, Russell-Martin plays her without sentiment, offering no special pleading, the better to show the brutalising impact of a loveless childhood.
To honour Fagan, who writes from personal experience, she gives a performance that is both unromantic and sensitive. Despite the violence, drugs and crime, you believe her when she says she is a good person. Her dream of reinventing herself tells us that this is not who she is but how she was made.
Russell-Martin is the great strength of Debbie Hannan’s National Theatre of Scotland production that just manages to save itself from two risks. On the one hand, the supporting performances can feel underpowered, as if nobody can quite match the steely magnetism of Anais. There is strong work from McMenemy and others, but also moments of restraint that deserve to be explosive.
On the other hand, Lewis den Hertog’s excellent video design threatens to overwhelm the simple storytelling at the play’s heart. Creating hyperreal nightmares from its distorted source material, it is broodingly intense as it evokes the turbulent layers of the girl’s inner life. For all that, it’s hard to beat the special theatrical energy you feel when the cast bang out a revolutionary rhythm on the metalwork of Max Johns’s set. When Hannan trusts the material, as she does in the closing moments, it can be devastating – not least because, finally, Anais smiles.
•At Traverse, Edinburgh, until 19 October.
