To be fair, if the play kicked off two minutes ago and a teenage girl has already decapitated a chicken, even before a boy has lurched towards it with a syringe you can make the solid assumption that you’re watching something a little out of the ordinary, be that for better or worse. Fortunately Janice Okoh’s Bruntswood Prize winning play veers towards the former as it continues its run at the Bush Theatre after its premiere last month at Manchester’s Royal Exchange.
The story follows the lives of 16 year old Tiana, 13 year old Tionne and 9 year old Tanika from their sparsely decorated living room on an anonymous Lewisham estate, Mother Jackie is nowhere to be seen. Listening to the delusional aspirations of elder-sister Tiana, one can guess that these young people barely venture far from these four walls and that their lives are inevitably made more difficult by the fact that they were born within them. There’s no doubt, we’ve returned to the kitchen sink, only this time there’s a little girl taking a dump in it.
Three Birds features an immense performance from Susan Wakoma as 9 year old Tanika, whose incessant childish chatter is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking, never once plopping into grating over-exaggeration. Lee Oakes also stands out as the curiously eloquent neighbourhood dealer, though Ms Jenkins (Claire Brown), the manic, politically correct school-teacher idolised by Tanika, is an addition that is perhaps a tad cartoonish at times. Darkly humorous and unsettling, you may see the end coming, but you’ll be waiting on edge for someone to say it out loud. 4/5
