The second play in the Lion and Unicorn’s Gaea Festival also unfolds in prison but it is survival, not sewing, that concerns the cellmates in Jane Shephard’s ‘Nine’.
Two girls, chained to opposite sides of the cell, are alternatively removed for vicious beatings. As each one returns, the other tries to talk their companion back to life. The shorthand they use to describe their experience is frighteningly economical: ‘They didn’t do any work inside.’
Mary Mallen and Emily White’s writhing response to the beatings is intensely raw and tough to endure. But, despite this show’s undoubted visceral impact, the anonymity of these girls makes it too easy to walk away from ‘Nine’, battered but not bruised.