Tusk Tusk

Overview

There's something refreshing about these particular angsty youths. They show so little sign of that neologism-spinning, tech-tuned, so-sharp-you'll-cut-yourself dialect contrived for young characters and expected of young authors, they're practically real people. Their references are less Facebook, more Sendak. They don't talk like they're texting, but their lives are tied to a mobile phone in another, primal way.

Abandoned immediately after moving to a new London apartment, nearly 16-year-old Eliot (Miles Szanto), 14-year-old Maggie (Airlie-Jane Dodds) and six-year-old Finn (on opening, Kai Lewins; Zac Ynfante alternates) are waiting and hoping for their mother to ring. Their equally precocious 22-year-old creator, Polly Stenham, lauded for her debut That Face, knows them well and has them care for each other while harbouring conflicting agendas that bring them to the brink of Lord of the Flies-esque terrain.

Their sheer kid-ness manifests in their enjoyment of silly voices, their easy slips into make-believe and their hormone-driven hysterics. They have the uninhibited physical play of siblings, and, left to their own rule, they turn night into day, subsist on chips and cold takeaway and definitely don't unpack the boxes that surround them. But as time passes, the mystery of their missing mother and the imperative to keep their situation hidden overwhelms them.

The tension claws ever-upward throughout the first half of Tusk Tusk. It's woven by softly dropped references and stunning moments of light and shade and pulled tight by a sudden, grisly incident before intermission. Stenham's scripting is assured, but it wouldn't hold without the anchoring of its leads. As well as all being believable, Szanto is charismatic as Eliot, Lewins is cute and scarily capable as Finn, and Dodds is basically a hypnotist as Maggie. Thrash-pop scene changes and beautiful morning-to-night lighting complete their world.

Unfortunately, the delicate pacing of the first half burns out by the second, which collapses in screaming and histrionics and does not deliver the fleshy denouement needed to match the richness of the mystery. Stay to the end, though; these kids deserve your attention. In her short oeuvre, Stenham may have settled on a theme — upper-middle class people have trashy lives, too! — but it's one she's doing well.