Review: FIREBIRD, Trafalgar Studios 2, February 22 2016

Tia almost visibly vibrates with the need to be loved, something her friend Katie (14 years old, like Tia) understands, but can't deliver, the usual teenage spats heightened by booze and fags as the girls play (and fail) at being grown-ups. But Tia has dealt with a grown-up nightmare that she is articulating by half-burying and half-boasting about it - a set of terrifying ordeals at the hands of men who prey on vulnerable girls like her at "parties".

Phil Davies' first full-length play is inspired by the recent horrific events in his home town of Rochdale, which led to the convictions of nine men for sex offences in 2012. It's fuelled by a fury that flames inside him (and, soon enough, inside us) about how these girls were treated, not just by the criminals, but by the police, social services and, ultimately, by the society within which they should have found a place. To a lesser or greater extent, we are all arraigned by a play that can justifiably be described as a Cathy Come Home for our times. Firebird is in equal parts distressing and moving, and not something I expect to leave my mind for years to come.

That huge impact is partly the result of the clarity of the writing, writing that never forgets that this is a play with a message and not a message in a play, but also the product of three tremendous performances.

Tahirah Sharif's Katie doesn't have a lot to do in her first scene, but returns to clarify so much without ever being anything but a goodhearted girl who is a bit misbehaved, but no more than that - she's an everygirl that comes so close to a hideous fate. Phadlut Sharma is menacing, charismatic but no monster as the man who does monstrous things having turned poor Tia's head with a couple of trinkets and the attention she so wants. He's just a guy on the make in a lot of ways - and all the more dangerous for that. Sharif doubles his procurer role with one as a police investigator in a clever piece of casting that asks us to consider who else might be a villain of the piece.

Callie Cooke is on stage throughout the play as Tia, the victim of these crimes, but a girl who is bright, funny and has plenty of what's needed to get on in life. I don't usually care for shouty acting, but in this case it's fully justified in a dazzling performance that, had I not known the fact that she played the role in the play's first run at Hampstead Theatre, I would genuinely worry about the emotional strain she must bear to go through this night after night. Okay, it's a wonderful part, but Cooke is fantastic for all 80 minutes, biting her lip as she tries to comprehend what's happening, convulsing with anger and fear and then seeing what she must do with awful clarity as she grows up far too quickly for a second time. Cooke burns with an incandescent light that makes her both hard to look at, but impossible to ignore.

It's no surprise to discover that The Children's Society have adopted Firebird as an awareness-raising tool, as it brings the almost indescribable horrors of sex trafficking undertaken on a literally incredible scale, down to a level that demands we look without blinking, without thinking of it as being "other", a problem of a section of multicultural Britain and not just Britain, without consigning it to the kind of people shown and sneered at on the Jeremy Kyle Show. It implicates us all and it is from us all that the solutions must come.

Firebird continues at the Trafalgar Studios 2 until 19 March.

Photo Robert Day

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