Do You Know Where Your Daughter Is?

Sex, hooch and RnB. Perhaps Angie Le Mar felt that drugs might prove an issue too far, but every other danger facing unsupervised teenagers makes an appearance on her stage. As Carla pushes inexorably away from her overbearing mother, it's the loudest and proudest of her peers who begin to have the biggest influence over her. And the main issue at stake is men. Le Mar's dialogue is studded with gems: "what do you want to go to maths for?" asks Mikki, the most damaged and dangerous girl in college, "they got tills now that add everything up for you." But while Le Mar scores perfectly with accurate representations of young black dialogue and storylines that hit their mark, as polished drama her play is lacking. The relationships between the girls are baffling: there isn't a hint of genuine friendship in sight. Occasionally too her messages, on underage sex, father figures and authority, are so blatant as to take on the glow of public service broadcasts, and clumsy, protracted scene changes disrupt the story's flow. Ultimately, the play emerges as well meaning and incisively observed, but Le Mar is too obvious about her good intentions for any haunting dramatic complexity to emerge.