Tough at the bottom

At the age of 15, Adam has torn up a guinea-pig, killed his mother's cat and urinated all over the course work that he has to hand in for his art GCSE.

Janine is also 15 and has a talent for being a car mechanic but has ended up at a garage which serves as a front for her violent pimp.

Yet Fin Kennedy's taut, attentiongrabbing new drama does not concentrate so much on these characters as on the social workers struggling to affect their lives.

At a point when it seems easier for headlines to demonise the young and disaffected rather than focus on the cycles of abuse and betrayal that create them, Protection races the audience through a sparky evocation of individuals tackling some of the greatest problems facing Tony Blair's Britain.

Rather like the nervy attention span of a teenager, the play flickers from one subject to another, so that one second the audience is focusing, say, on Angela, the cocky ex-City worker who is having an affair with her boss at the family support social services team, and the next it is zooming in on Damien, who is far more manipulated by his troubled charge Janine than he is aware.

In the past the Soho has been guilty of fostering plays seemingly more suited to television than stage, but here, the televisual brevity of each episode proves a strength, since Kennedy can tackle vital issues of ethics, funding, and emotional self-control without ever lapsing into turgid longwindedness.

Apart from a couple of somewhat squirm-inducing seduction scenes, he proves himself more than worthy of his position as the Soho's Pearson writer-in-residence - and his confident tone makes it unsurprising that Kennedy is the son of two social workers.

A superbly credible cast makes artistic director Abigail Morris's production one of her best to date.

Until 26 July. Box office: 020 7478 0100.

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