The monster bunch

Life isn't pretty for half-sisters Affy and Di. Their living room is as cosy as a blocked drain and their mother, Chloe, is an alcoholic prostitute in thrall to an abusive pimp whom the teenagers nickname Godzilla (a monster the audience never sees). The sisters look out for each other and for Chloe, but when Affy moves in with her dad, Di is left home alone with mum and violence spills out.

Commissioned by the impressive Clean Break, a theatre company which works with women in prisons, Tanika Gupta's Inside Out is a letdown. The girls are a sparky, likeable pair who want brighter futures; their bleary mother, infantilised by booze, is a write-off from the start.

Unlike Rona Munro's Iron, this isn't theatre that works its way into the parts people lock up. Chloe's racism towards her black daughter isn't probed. Di seemingly commits murder in self-defence, but we later learn she stabbed her victim eight times.

We watch these bruised lives but never quite feel we're let in. What we get is a hopeful ending: grit tidied up with a dustpan and brush.