Powder Room: Film review - MJ Delaney mixes comedy, pathos and bawdiness

(15) MJ Delaney, 86 mins Starring: Sheridan Smith, Jaime Winstone, Kate Nash

There have been plentiful plays and film about troubled men on nights out, Paddy Chayefsky's Marty and Harold Pinter's A Night Out among them. MJ Delaney's adaptation of Rachel Hirons' play When Women Wee gives the birds'-eye view.

It is set almost entirely in the women's toilet at a nightclub. Its characters are the young women who come there to plot, gossip, take drugs or to seek refuge from the dancefloor.

Sheridan Smith excels as the lonely everywoman Sam, putting on an act to impress her snooty friends Michelle (Kate Nash) and Jess (Oona Chaplin), although she is really at a dead end in her own life.

Delaney directs in sure-footed fashion, mixing comedy, pathos and bawdiness without ever seeming self-indulgent.