A murderous adventure

This study of black-on-black killing and the culture that produces young murderers premiers just three weeks after another play on a similar theme, Elmina's Kitchen by Kwame Kwei-Armah.

And although Roy Williams's play is a disturbing evocation of young black life on a council estate where a youth has been murdered, its sketchiness is exposed in any comparison with Kwei-Armah's far more comprehensive and searching account of black alienation.

Williams, who won the Evening Standard's Most Promising playwright award in 2001, found his inspiration for Fallout in the murder of pre-teenage Damilola Taylor, though in Fallout, the victim, clever, studious Kwame, is older and set for university.

Williams uses his case of violent teenage killing to explore the kind of environment that breeds such murderers and hatred. He also neatly contrasts - a little too neatly in fact - the conflicts in the black teenage gang that shields the killer behind the traditional wall of silence with the antagonisms of the investigating black and white detectives.

Ian Rickson, a director admired for his sensitive, psychologically nuanced productions, goes in for spectacular staging. All seats in the stalls have been removed and an oval playing area created, which takes in auditorium and stage with the audience ranged in the round.

The setting, a bare space with a flight of steps as on a council estate, is so neutral and neutered that it is hard to justify these transformations: Williams's play text has neither scenes nor set locations. The action swings between the faltering police investigation and teenage gangsters, who talk in a terse, vigorous patois, with two lippy girls often in provocative attendance.

The murder by kicking, which we half-see on the steps, precipitates little nagging of consciences or guilty clash of loyalties, even when one girl unbelievably puts herself forward as a vital murder witness. The play's small tensions are sexually and conventionally motivated. In a uniformly excellent cast of natural-born actors Michael Obiora's mild-mannered teenage gang-leader Dwayne, with an alcoholic, begging father waxes hot for Ony Uhiara's sexy Shanice, whose boyfriend Emile, the sturdy Marcel McCalla, is murdered because of insecurity and envy. Lennie James, terrific as the astute black detective who came from just such an estate and sees Emile as the luckless life-victim he might have become, energises Rickson's fine production and Williams's thin socio-drama with angry passion.

Fallout