Concrete Playground

Young love can make a whole lot of life's rotten, unfair burdens bearable, but for teenagers Tamara (Sophie Hensser) and Squid (Meyne Wyatt), it may not be enough. They leave homes of absent parents, incarcerated siblings and cupboards empty of even unwholesome breakfasts to attend a scantly resourced urban Sydney public school from which most students aren't expected to graduate. If someone believes in them, it's usually fleeting. Outside of school, they run amok and make meaning of a familiar topography — the meeting ground of Town Hall, the galleried glamour of CBD shops, the strafing lights and menace of Kings Cross. The world is painted and scenes transitioned through narration, mostly Tamara's. You'll want to listen. Their dramas resonate beyond the usual boundaries of adolescence.

Lachlan Philpott's script, in its first performance after winning the 2009 Griffin Award that sent it into production, is bold, poetic, insightful, truly affecting and wonderfully, literally close to home. It's extraordinary the levels to which he's been able to penetrate and embody the teenage mind — Facebook-checking and headphones-dependency unpatronisingly explained — as well as the minutiae of the school world most of us have happily repressed (Philpott couldn't; he's a teacher).

Still, it's a hard one to pull off, so it's fortunate this show is so well cast and directed (by Lee Lewis, fresh off the Sydney Theatre Company's ZEBRA!). Wyatt, in particular, puts in a stunning performance as Squid, a boy of comparably few words but plenty of raw charm and an alarming intensity written in his eyes. Hensser, considering she spends two hours parlaying the incessant stream-of-consciousness of a 15-year-old girl, can notch up a success in making Tamara anything other than completely annoying, and ultimately, she makes a lot more of her than that. Her Tamara is inquisitive, bubbling with potential, cute and fragile. The two multi-purposed adults, Camilla Ah Kin and Kirk Page, are wonderful, and Ah Kin's rendering of the outwardly wry, inwardly empathetic and nostalgic teacher Ms Petchall is an undisputed highlight.

Their fates play out against a Sydney skyline cuprocked into a chain-link fence. It's effusively teenage, and like so many of Griffin's inventive yet space-constrained sets, when you think you know it, you don't know it at all.