Star rating: ****
In the blackboard jungle, it's war. The boys are tough guys in waiting, while the girls just want to be drop-dead gorgeous. As they snaffle after scraps of love and chocolate, marking out their territory as they go, sex and death go beyond the usual biology to crash and burn in far bigger ways.
So far so Skins, then, in Sam Holcroft's first full-length work, the first of four new plays by untried writers in the Debuts season co-produced by the Traverse with the National Theatre of Scotland.
But beyond the usual class-room kids' stuff, Holcroft gradually unravels a world where there's not enough boys to make up the school football team because they're all being called up for combat. Meg Fraser's teacher, Beth, is Jean Brodie with a cop show walkie-talkie and mantra-like faith in a just war and a fiance she dresses up nice for.
As emotions spill over into violence, abuse, self-loathing and the horrific de-sexualisation of Laura McMonagle's Danielle, survival of the fittest, it seems, has been flipped on its head. Only Frances Ashman's bright-eyed Mmoma, who just wants a boyfriend but ends up as a surrogate mother to the other women left behind, understands.
There's a fiercely calculated intelligence to Holcroft's startling and sometimes shocking piece of work, which transposes text-book genetics to adolescent angst in extreme times with unflinchingly brutal and understatedly matter-of-fact poetry. The economy of each exchange lends a fluidity to Vicky Featherstone's wide-open production, allowing its dynamic young cast to explore the here-and-now of things with vulnerability and depth. On many levels, then, Cockroach is the future, and should be taken very seriously indeed.
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