Cassie and the Lights – Southwark Playhouse Borough, London

Writer and Director: Alex Howarth

There is a reference early on in this play about three sisters’ experience of the care system to Tracy Beaker. Alex Howarth’s work builds on the same foundations laid out by Tracy’s creator, Jacqueline Wilson, using comedy and love to tell stories involving immeasurable amounts of pain.

Cassie and the Lights tells the story of teenager Cassie (Alex Brain), who has to take care of her younger sisters, Helen Chong’s astronomy-obsessed 10-year-old Tin and hilarious-but-clingy 7-year-old Kit (Emily McGlynn). When the girls’ mother walks off, leaving them at a bowling alley and never returning, Cassie tries her best, but eventually, social services find out and place the trio with a foster couple.

Howarth’s approach sees the three girls re-enact key moments from the most turbulent year of their lives with a warmth and humour that immediately bridges the actor-audience divide. Ruth Badila’s set design, battered pastel suitcases that open up to reveal props, sets or spaces for projected images, echoes the combination of playfulness and discomfort at knowing that the girls’ future is uncertain.

Chong and McGlynn, each called upon to play a young child, produce performances that really convey the spirit and optimism of two young girls whose older sister has successfully shielded them from what life has thrown at them. McGlynn, in particular, revels in the juicily written role of Kit, milking the comedic innocence and the pain that simmers within with levels of humour and empathy that remind one of Victoria Wood.

The most visceral part of the story is Cassie’s, though. When their foster placement becomes longer term, and the prospect of adoption is raised, Brain skilfully and heartbreakingly explores the conflict in a seventeen-year-old who feels that she should be the one looking after her siblings, even when her own life and those of her sisters might suffer if she does.

Adults in the scenario manifest only as voiceovers, with actors including Wendi Peters, John Thomson and Louisa Harland lending their voices. There is a distance there, the sense that the grown-ups in the girls’ lives are too far away to give them what they need. We also get a sense of how the bureaucracy involved in Cassie’s application to formally be her sisters’ carer, however well-intentioned, places her at an immediate disadvantage in ways that inflict so much pain.

But as Cassie and the Lights deals with the trauma and heartbreak inflicted on three children in ways that affect so many others in the care system, it also manages to demonstrate that bonds made of love are unbreakable. Alex Howarth’s unmissable work may only be 70 minutes long, but it remains in your heart for far longer. Jacqueline Wilson would be proud.

Continues until 20 April 2024