Theatre

Zena Edwards enters the barest of BAC stages with the smallest bag of tricks under her arm. It contains a clutch of visual clues to the disparate crowd of Londoners she’ll bring to interconnected life. But it’s her potent physicality, and her astounding, silver-tongued wordsmithery that work all the magic in this hour-long look at fractured communities, the dream of new beginnings and the harsh reality of precipitous endings, which come courtesy of the knife crime riddling London’s poorest streets.

Under Anthony Shrubsall and Katie Pearson’s sparse direction, Edwards morphs with agility and mischievous, musical charm into a handful of heightened characters who congregate in a Hackney park. Mahmoud is a Palestinian cameraman with a poetic soul and a horror of personal hygiene; Algernon is an elderly West Indian with a penchant for shiny shoes and dispensing personal advice. Ayleen is the least successful, an uncomfortable mix of comically sassy, blinged-up teen, MC in training, and the thoughtful, wounded girl whose twin brother, Elijah, is soon to become victim to the culture of crime encircling them all.

In an evening so fresh, proud and honest, it seems churlish to complain, but Edwards’s show comes to a jarring end with the violent death of its least pivotal character, leaving the handful of other storylines hanging. If it leaves you hankering for resolution, however, this remains a deeply original, dramatically dextrous portrait of London’s bewildering kaleidoscope of difficult, defiant life.