Soho Theatre, London
Michael Billington
Wednesday July 9, 2003
The Guardian
A celebrated speech in David Hare's Skylight passionately puts the case for social workers as people who "try and clear out society's drains". In his highly promising first play, Fin Kennedy goes further by showing social workers in action. While he suggests the job makes inordinate demands on its practitioners, he leaves you in no doubt about its necessity.
Kennedy's achievement is to focus on a specific family services group without losing sight of the big political picture. Dawn, the team leader, has to cope with funding shortages, alopecia and estrangement from her own daughter. Bright, purposeful Angela, who is sleeping with her boss, bends the rules in coping with an abused 15-year-old arsonist. Damien, whose real interest is in play therapy, vainly tries to protect an absconding teenage car mechanic from the police. And Shirley, heading for retirement in Dominica , wistfully recalls an age when social workers didn't need computerised handsets to monitor their safety.
It would be easy to conclude that social workers have as many problems as their clients. The key scene is one in which Dawn has a head-on confrontation with Geoff, the operational manager. He argues that her team is consistently failing to meet government "closure targets". She responds that, with 200 kids in the borough in need of protection, they can never claim to have "solved" individual problems. This not only gets to the heart of the matter, but becomes a metaphor for a much wider political issue: the temptation to massage figures to achieve artificially imposed targets.
Occasionally, Kennedy stretches probability to make things more dramatic: the affair between idealistic Angela and her neo-Thatcherite boss seems unlikely and is not helped by their ill-directed restaurant encounter. But otherwise, Abigail Morris's production keeps all the main characters in sharp focus and gets good performances from Margot Leicester as the harassed, self-punishing Dawn, Saira Todd as the rule-breaking Angela and Matthew Delamere as a miscast social worker who plays with a radio-controlled truck during team meetings.
But the real excitement lies in discovering a young writer who is more concerned with major political issues than minor domestic upsets.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
Rachel Halliburton
9 July 2003
The Evening Standard
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, attention-grabbing 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 long-windedness.
This playwright 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.