Truths that must be told

How guilty were London's social services for the death of Victoria Climbie? 8-year-old Victoria died in February 2000, the victim of child abuse by the now-jailed Marie-Therese Kouao and her partner Karl Manning. This vital if arduous dramatisation of the inquiry into her death focuses on the role played by successive local authorities: Ealing, Brent, Haringey.

Adaptor/director Lance Neilsen prunes the 55-day inquest to reveal how mismanagement, incompetence and underfunding tore holes in the several safety nets that might have caught Victoria as she fell.

Neilsen draws on a catalogue of grimly repetitive testimonies. There's the WPC who wouldn't visit Victoria's home, to investigate accusations of sexual abuse, because she was scared of contracting scabies. There's the social services manager from Brent who admits to closing cases that shouldn't be closed simply to alleviate his several hundred-strong backlog. And there's Lisa Arthurworrey, Victoria's beleaguered social worker, who met Victoria, alone, only twice in the seven months preceding the girl's death. "It is," she acknowledges, "appalling".

"What's the point of procedures," blazes Neil Garnham QC (Jonathan Hansler), "if people just ignore them?"

While it asks uncomfortable questions of society as a whole, Those Who Trespass Against Us is equally a demand for individuals to take responsibility. It's not as forensically edited as its recent forebear, the Tricycle's Stephen Lawrence play, The Colour of Justice. But its right to our attention, while less headline-grabbing, is every bit as urgent.

It's unfortunate, then, that Neilson trusts the events of the inquiry insufficiently. He has little Victoria skip across the stage. He adds snatches of conversation conducted as part of his own research. Most damaging, though, is that the performances sometimes stray from the low-key neutrality that is essential if such dramatisations are to retain our trust.The court-case-as-theatre genre provides a valuable public service, but it suffers when theatricality is allowed to cloud the audience's view of the hard facts. Nevertheless, this up-to-the-minute edit of Climbie's abandonment by society represents an admirable accomplishment by Neilsen's shoestring company, and remains informative, alarming viewing.

Those Who Trespass Against Us: The Victoria Climbie Inquiry