This Wide Night

When motherly Lorraine is released from prison, her first impulse is to seek out daughter-substitute Marie and, seemingly involuntarily, set up a claustrophobic idyll which turns the latter's bedsit into a shared cell. The tone of Chloe Moss's play for female ex-offenders charity Clean Break, is almost unremittingly harsh: balloons of hope briefly float up only to be mercilessly punctured, and there's sufficient use of the F-word to make Gordon Ramsay proud. Though it's understandable that Moss wanted to avoid anything redolent of escapism, a little more fantasy in Lucy Morrison's direction might have been welcome.