It is early days yet, but already Soho Theatre has established itself as a powerful force. The body of work it is creating ploughs a furrow of new writing that has been neglected by other theatres.
Artistic director Abigail Morris would probably hate the idea that you can define a Soho play, but out of seven plays this season five have been written by women, all have an immediate accessibility, and most have a kind of blatant honesty about them as they give voice to the lives of very ordinary people. If I had to pigeonhole Soho plays I would say that they often see the extraordinary in the ordinary, the diamonds in the dirt. None more so than these two plays that as a double bill make a long but rewarding evening. They are of such different emotional tenor, however, they might be better savoured on separate viewings.
Amanda Whittington's Be My Baby gives the lie to the idea of the swinging 60s with a story of four girls waiting out their pregnancies in a mother and baby home. It is an old story, but one worth repeating, not least as a reminder of the shame and secrets endured by our mothers' generation.
Whittington writes with a freshness about the innocence and ignorance of teenagers whose enthusiasm for the three-minute romantic dreams peddled by girl groups such as the Shangri-Las and the Ronettes is only matched by their naivety about their own bodies, men and the harsh realities of the world. There is a lovely, tiny moment in the play when middle-class Mary, forcibly sent to the home by her anxious mother, decides to run away. She puts on her gloves to do so, well brought up even in extremis.
There is something very simple and direct about this play. If it were a person you would say it had no side. If it were a person you would want to hold it and hug it.
Jessica Townsend's Angels and Saints is much more autumnal. Just when you think this is another one of those Irish plays about the frustrations of a middle-aged Catholic virgin caring for her elderly gran, it surprises you.
Coming back from the local Spar one day, 46-year-old Noreen has an ecstatic sexual experience in the church graveyard with a Scotsman with a drink problem. And that is about it. Except that Townsend writes with a matter of fact poetry so that the grimness of Noreen's life becomes a kind of benediction. Gabrielle Ready plays Noreen with such lumpy, luminous grace that the play makes you want to rush off to churchyards to find your own angel.
Till June 17. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
