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Home is where the hurt is: and this heartfelt pair of plays brings new meaning to the old cliche. They're the work of two emerging writers, trained by Clean Break as part of a programme designed to amplify BAME voices. The company has helped form their stories by putting them in contact with women who've had experience of the criminal justice system, to create a painful look at the difficulties of finding somewhere safe to return to.
In Chino Odimba's 'Amongst the Reeds', two teenage migrants hide out in an abandoned house while they dream of the life they could have, if only they had the paperwork. They only come out at night, to raid the bins of the local takeaway - rumours of people being packed off in Home Office vans are never far away.
Somalia Seaton's 'House' is about a building that should have a more valid claim to feel like a home, but for Patricia, it never quite does. Her devoutly Christian mother is obsessed with rules and conformity – and having broken out of home so dramatically, she struggles to reassemble the pieces of their relationship. It's the stronger of the two short plays, with plenty of wryly observed moments that hint at the weird dynamics families brew up amongst themselves. Michelle Greenidge makes a great matriarch, her face morphing from mild tolerance to increasingly set fury as her daughters defy her, or open old wounds without even trying.
In other places, these stories feel undercooked, rather than raw. There's a certain inevitability to the eleventh-hour revelations of childhood trauma, and to the themes hammered home with repeated fragments of dialogue. Since writing these two plays, Seaton and Odimba have both independently gone on to work with acclaimed new writing theatres like The Tricycle and The Bush – a heartening success story, built on these slightly shaky foundations.