Girls' estate

THEATRE Backpay, Cockroach, Who? Royal Court Upstairs, London

An alienated girl provides the centre for both Jess Walters's Cockroach, Who? and Tamantha Hammerschlag's Backpay, two products of the Royal Court Young People's Theatre now showing at the Ambassadors. In the former, set on a bleak south London housing estate, the girl is 15- year-old Natasha (Nicola Stapleton). Raw with pain and anger at the death of the drunken father she thought she despised, she tries to tough things out by not even telling her best mate Chantelle (Tameka Empson) or Tracey (Alicya Eyo), the 13-year-old who tags along. The rituals seemingly normal for this age group on the estate (playing truant, getting stoned, being rude to the old) are amusingly counterpointed by the behaviour of the three elderly women who gather in the run-down launderette for mutually supportive sessions of moaning and tea drinking.

I could have done without the broken-winged pigeon that dies in Natasha's arms ("'n 'arf a weight, in't ya?") and which, as she alternately rails against it ("Vermin, you're nothing to do with me") and prepares to give it a tender burial in a Nike box, becomes a somewhat forced surrogate for the father whose funeral she couldn't bring herself to attend. Even here, though, the curt, laconic humour of the piece and of Caroline Hall's finely acted production continues to surface, as when Natasha solemnly explains to the kindly oldster Lilly (Miriam Karlin) that she cleaned up the dead bird in Wash-'n'-Go for dry and damaged hair. And the sentimental symbolism of wanting to throw the pigeon's ashes "away from the estate" is heftily offset by the grotesque idea of cooking it to cinders overnight in the family oven.

Cockroach, Who? is particularly good on the tricky relationship between the girls. There's a dangerous charge in the physical charms and emotional immaturity of the 13-year-old, who produces flickers of lesbian feeling in Chantelle and causes a rift that explodes into violence between the older pair. "There's a lot in my head, you know," reveals the casually disturbing Tracey. "I just can't be bothered to say it."

Apathy of this kind is not a problem in the post-apartheid South Africa that is the setting for Backpay. As the black student Bafanu remarks, with studied irony, "We certainly lead an interesting life in this country. Not like in other countries, where they lead such dull lives all they have to talk about is sex. Here at least we have hijackings and shootings and murders to amuse us!"

The young female at the centre of this play, which was premiered last October as part of the Young Writers' Festival, is white student Mina (Diane O'Kelly), who, alienated from her own culture, traces and visits her old black nanny Sophie (Dona Croll).

The awkwardnesses of this reunion are well brought out. For example, Sophie's schoolteacher daughter Adele (played with a lovely, calm, amused insolence by Valerie Hunkins) has good reason to resent the child who occupied all her mother's time. She calls Mina "a spoilt kid playing at revolution" and, when the white girl makes the rejoinder that the revolution is over, she puts her in her place by saying that it never happened. When Mina gets pregnant by Sophie's son, the play can't avoid moments of shrill, point-making melodrama, but it's still an affecting study of a girl who has come to feel like a foreigner in her own country and who wants to go home, but no longer knows where that is.

`Backpay' Mon-Sat 7pm, `Cockroach, Who?' Mon-Sat 8.45, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs (at the Ambassadors), West Street, London WC2 (0171-565 5000)