Finborough, London
This 80-minute play is the product of an unusual partnership between an emerging young actor, Toby Wharton, and a veteran of feminist theatre, Tash Fairbanks. The result is a raw, edgy piece that, even if it has several loose ends, offers a vivid picture of a pair of siblings badly damaged by spending their adolescence in an East End care home.
The main focus is on 17-year-old Fog (an acronym for "Fuck Off, Gary") now reclaimed by his widowed, ex-army dad, Cannon, with whom he sets up home in a tower block loftily named Milton Heights. But what is clear is that Fog has no real idea of who he is. Like one of the white boys in Roy Williams's Lift Off, he affects the Jamaican patois of his one friend, Michael. His tough-guy stance and gangsta-rap speech, however, fool neither his pugilistic dad nor his sister, Lou, who, it transpires, is an ex-druggie and as much a victim of fostering as himself.
I would have liked more detail about the failures of the care system, and I found it hard to credit the friendship of Michael, an aspiring, Oxford-bound psychology student, and the hapless Fog. But the two authors write punchy dialogue and show a sharp understanding of displaced people: not only Fog and Lou, but also their father, Cannon, still dreaming of his days as an army boxer and bereft in a civvy street where he can earn only £12,000 a year as a security guard.
Che Walker's production also has a swift urgency and is vigorously acted. Wharton himself lends Fog the nervy intensity of a kid who may pretend to be the knife-brandishing hero of a pop song like Original Nuttah, but who, in fact, has no fixed identity. Victor Gardener as his angry dad, Annie Hemingway as his roughly used sister, and Benjamin Cawley and Kanga Tanikye-Buah as a pair of high-flying black siblings offer strong support. And, even if the parts are stronger than the whole, the play's portrait of a social system that offers care but no protection leaves an uneasy aftertaste.