Katherine Soper’s Bruntwood prize-winning text, here given its first production, features the struggles of young people trying to make their way in a harsh world - now indifferent, now hostile. It comes across as deeply heartfelt but is, as yet, more a series of issue-led scenes than a fully developed drama.
Two siblings live alone. Dean (Joseph Quinn, right) is 17 and confined to the house by idiosyncratic and hard-to-control behaviours; his benefits may be cut, unreasonably. Dean’s older sister, Tamsin (Erin Doherty), finds work in a distribution warehouse, where conditions are draconian and targets punishing. Here, she is befriended by 16-year-old student Luke (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), and treated considerately by her equally oppressed line manager (identified only as The Lead in the cast list and played with fine feeling by Aleksander Mikic).
Exchanges between the characters come across mostly as pretexts to transmit information to the audience: about the difficulties of dealing with social services, the trials of low-skilled labour and the restricted choices of people on low incomes. These are all worthy themes and the play would work well as an introduction to workshops around the consequent problems and what can or cannot be done to resolve them.
Matthew Xia’s direction, however, freights this slight but potentially interesting piece of work with a lumbering, pace-killing, industrial-style set and unnecessarily melodramatic effects (a painful domestic accident is given major disaster blackout and loud sound). Promising performances by the young cast, if given space to grow, would give depth to a piece that, at present, feels more like an illustration to than an exploration of its ideas.
• At the Royal Exchange, Manchester until 15 October, then touring
