The Stage

Off the Endz

Published Monday 22 February 2010 at 12:20 by Mark Shenton

“I grew up on an estate, but you know what? It wasn’t that bad,” 28-year-old Olivier Award-winning playwright Bola Agbaje said in a recent interview. But the characters in her latest play, Off the Endz, desperately want off one, and this uncompromising portrait of their aspirations and failures charts the routes they seek to take to make that a reality.

Daniel Francis (Kojo) and Lorraine Burroughs (Sharon) in Off The Endz at the Royal Court Photo: Tristram Kenton

For Kojo and Sharon - now in a relationship, he working in a corporate job that’s under threat, she as a nurse - it’s the hope of taking out a mortgage and moving home, with a baby on the way. For David, however, newly out of prison, it’s back to his old ways - dealing drugs - except that his former patch is now controlled by some unnervingly young kids. And they’ve got guns to enforce their rule.

This feels a world away from the usual preoccupations of Sloane Square and there’s perhaps something a little voyeuristic about the window into another world it tentatively opens. It would play far more authentically as part of the theatre’s imminent season in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, though it isn’t actually part of it. But the gritty writing and Jeremy Herrin’s propulsive production give it an uneasy, raw and vivid energy that utterly compels the attention.

That’s notably driven by the fine performances of a company that features a conflicted Daniel Francis, torn between his loyalty to his old friend - performed with an insolent sense of danger by Ashley Walters - and his partner, played with an increasing exasperation by Lorraine Borroughs. There’s a haunting sense of the peril and potential for loss he puts himself in.