BWW Reviews: BLACKBERRY TROUT FACE, Unicorn Theatre, November 24 2011

With a note in the Frosties box and fifty quid wedged under the microwave, Mum was gone and Jakey, Kerrie and Cameron are alone with only their fear of the care home and brown sauce crackers to unite them.

So starts Laurence Wilson's bittersweet examination of the impact of drug addiction on three teenagers getting by on a sink estate in Liverpool. Elder boy Jakey is trying to pull away from a gang and projecting his growing anger at his own bad decisions into hatred of his now absent junkie mother; sixteen-year-old Kerrie copes and copes, before cracking as she comes to terms with the fact that her mother will never return the love and care her daughter provides; and thirteen-year-old Cameron is being bullied at school, but is quick-witted and beginning to edge towards a world in which might may not always be right.

20 Stories High's production is aimed at teenagers like Jakey, Kerrie and Cameron and connects with them through the subject matter and through the relationships between each of the characters. Leon Tagoe's charm invests Cameron with a warmth that makes the skinny kid more than just a punchbag. Nicola Bentley's earlier busy quasi-mothering makes Kerrie's critical decision at the end of the play all the more weighty, as we have seen what Kerrie could be. Of the thee actors, David Lyon has the most difficult transition to make, as Jakey accepts his role in the family and in the world giving up his Rambo fantasies and escape route into the army to do what Cameron wants and stay.

Under Julia Samuels tight direction and blessed with three strong performances, Blackberry Trout Face delivers its brief without patronising an audience very aware of what it's like to be told, "We know best". With "The evil of drugs" storylines commonplace in soap operas, it's hard to do something entirely original with this material, but by focusing on three ordinary kids talking to each other in their kitchen, while the world of drugs, gangs and prostitution washes up all the way to their front door, this play will entertain and inform teens - and parents.  

Blackberry Trout Face is at The Unicorn Theatre until Saturday 26 November.

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