Pests

Pink and her little sister Rolly are the sort of drug-addled young people that politicians of all colours seek to vilify or redeem. Pink is a manipulative junkie prone to psychotic hallucination; Rolly is an illiterate mother-to-be, in and out of prison. They come from foster homes and live on a sink estate where they are routinely exploited for sex and violence to get cash they blow on heroin. But for Vivienne Franzmann, who won Manchester’s Bruntwood Prize in 2008 with her debut play ‘Mogadishu’, the two twentysomethings are spirited survivalists who miraculously represent hope.

The sisters have invented their own language somewhere between the Nadsat of Anthony Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and modern street patois. This lingo is mostly sub-yardie ‘ting’ and ‘arks’, but the girls coin their own neologisms and although they can hardly read they still reference Dickens and Swift. Franzmann’s dialogue is a blend of lyrical realism cut with social commentary (which perhaps shows its patrician hand by citing Radio Four’s ‘The Archers’).

But the relentlessly bleak story – developed with Clean Break Theatre Company – condenses many women’s experience of the criminal justice system and offers respect and understanding where outrage and incarceration normally prevail.

Lucy Morrison’s intense production is a dingy descent into the violent squalor of these women’s abandoned lives. Designer Joanna Scotcher sets the action on a hillock of mouldy mattresses framed within a scaffold of plumbing and wiring. Across this, whirling fractals are projected like incipient psychoses. As Rolly, Ellie Kendrick is a gutsy little sister gestating a baby destined to be taken into care. Sinéad Matthews’s Pink, meanwhile, sets the pace as the controlling, fantasist big sister intent on maintaining a ‘Wizard of Oz’ dream world maintained by hand jobs, blow jobs and shoplifting. The pleasure is in their reckless defiance.