Shallow Slumber

'Only rich women get to be bad mothers unsupervised,' says Dawn, a funny, ferociously perceptive young woman who's just shot to Number One on Moira's caseload of council trash fuck-ups.

Chris Lee's two-hander, about a mother who abuses her baby and the social worker who consequently loses more than her job, was inspired by the Baby P tragedy. But if Dawn talks of giving in to the tabloid-defined role, of doing 'the worst fucking thing imaginable because they have already thought it of you', both Moira and the playwright (herself a social worker) have other ideas.

With the atmosphere stretched taut between two chairs at opposite ends of the narrow stage, three encounters play in reverse, returning us to the moment neither woman can escape.

Amy Cudden's Dawn is a tangle of class antagonism, self-hatred, dependency and distrust, caught in an exhausting pattern of emotional push and pull. Alexandra Gilbreath's Moira is the calm trying to quell her storm with caring.

In his commitment to voicing the unspeakable and illuminating the inexplicable, Lee leaves director Mary Nighy a little too dependent on both characters' uncommon articulacy. But it's the job of playwrights, like social workers, to go where others won't. And Dawn's deeply distressing closing speech, punctuated by Cudden with little spasms of horror, prises your mind's eye open on a scene that must have been as hard for Lee to imagine as it is for us to forget.