Grandma Nen Nen always said that sweet things look tempting, but they don't fill you up. Still, if you too had spent your life pulling weeds from a West Indian plantation, you probably would have a low opinion of sugar.
Sonia Hughes's play began life as a family history project at her son's school, and the bare bones of the story initially tumbled out in a single evening. But, like sugar, the raw material needed refining; and the play has moved through numerous phases of development prior to its debut at Manchester's Royal Exchange.
That's if one chooses to characterise this spare, delicate reminiscence as a play at all. It's more of a subtly dramatised poem, performed on a bare circle of earth by two actors speaking in the rich, rhythmic cadences of patois.
It tells the story of Joy, a young West Indian girl whose mother emigrates to England, leaving her to be brought up by her beloved Nen Nen back home. Mama sends gifts of shoes and ribbons, until the death of Nen Nen causes her to send for Joy herself. Suddenly the girl is transplanted from a blue wooden house with a pig in the yard to the disappointingly grey land of face creams and flushing toilets.
The strength of Hughes's writing is its simplicity. Eschewing complex phrases or metaphor, she compresses a world of child-like confusion into the blunt accusation: "You left me. Then you yank me back." Carla Henry invests the role of Joy with just the right degree of bewildered naivete, while Juliet Ellis adopts both the parts of indulgent grandma and estranged mother.
Wyllie Longmore gives the piece a sensitively unostentatious staging, gently enhanced by plangent accompaniment from Jim Parris's solo double bass. Yet even at barely an hour's duration, such slight elements quickly begin to exhaust their potential. It's sweet, but it doesn't quite fill you up.
· Until February 25. Box office: 0161-833 9833. Then touring.
