Hannah and Hanna, Battersea Arts Centre, London

Little women, big stars

This punchy and poignant cracker of a piece is the brainchild – or, rather, heartchild – of its author, the director, John Retallack, who has founded a new outfit called Company of Angels, which specialises in developing theatre for (and with) fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds. Old theatre-hands tend to welcome such initiatives on the self-interested grounds that they will nurture the future audiences sorely needed by this far from achingly hip art form. But it should also be applauded for trying to enhance this age group's lives right now.

You feel that Hannah and Hanna has been written and staged by a man who has not forgotten what it is like to be just pre-adult. It neither talks down to its audience nor sucks up to it. It taps into the energy and reference points of pop culture but pushes beyond the flattened values of that domain. It cleanses all the crud of defensive cynicism off touchy mid-adolescent perceptions and it's never for a moment preachy, even though with the particular story it tells, that must have been a real risk.

A two-hander, performed in a vibrantly choreographed presentational style by the eponymous duo, Hannah and Hanna also gives terrific roles to two young performers – Alyson Coote and Celia Meiras. I don't readily see how they could be better and the joy of working on material of this quality at such an early stage in their careers radiates from them infectiously.

The piece dramatises the developing relationship between Hanna (Ms Meiras) a sensitive sixteen-year-old Kosovan who comes over to Margate as a refugee, and Hannah (Ms Coote) a local girl of the same age who hides her troubled personal life behind a load of lip, tits and pink pedal-pushers. To her, it seems that Hanna has usurped her name and her town (the Kosovan kisses the ground of Margate which to her represents freedom; the indigenous teenagers are so bored that baiting foreigners feels like a smart way of killing time). When Hanna even takes over during one of her beloved karaoke numbers at the club, her namesake goes on the warpath.

After a violent racist incident brings about a cautious change of heart in the English girl, the story examines the irony that Hannah now becomes the asylum seeker, ostracised by her friends and going into a kind of nervous breakdown. As it embarks on the long moral and geographical journey from Margate back to Kosovo, the show is pitch-perfect in the way it balances pain with a buoyant rallying cry that tells you it is not impossible to do your bit to make the world a better place. Both girls have lovely voices and the production is clever in the way it uses pop songs (the underlying melancholy of Abba, say) as a way of extending emotion and of demonstrating the similarities and differences between the pair. The piece is also canny and magnanimous in its even-handed treatment of their sufferings.

Towards the end, I was wrestling with a lump in my throat the size of a watermelon. You never feel, however, that your emotions are being unfairly exploited. I am despatching my two older children – aged 12 and 14 – to the theatre posthaste. In terms of its range of appeal, 15 is a rather conservative estimate at the lower end and 19 a wildly conservative estimate at the upper.

To 17 Feb (020-7223 2223)