Your Number's Up

An ambitious play for its allotted 55 minutes, Your Number's Up throws the full complement of 'yoof culture' stereotypes at its ensemble cast.

Beginning with an apparently chance meeting over the body of a young man, the play jumps back to sketch out the characters' relationships. They're a spiky, swaggering bunch, liable to explode in a shower of expletives at the slightest provocation. This is an angry vision of young people in London, in which everyone is compromised along the lines of gender, class and race.

For all its compelling energy, too often the play resorts to cacophonous din with performers competing to make themselves heard. The scenes lurch from one bristling confrontation to another, and attempts to distill the scarce humour into an obnoxious, misogynistic wide-boy called Fletch are unsuccessful. Yet welcome breaks do emerge with the occasional healthy skewering of the fourth wall. The characters freeze, and a knowing monologue exposes the innards of the play, climaxing in a pleasing few minutes of crowd interaction just as the audience are beginning to check their watches.

Your Number's Up is a frantic and energetic attempt to examine rather a lot of issues. Chance, fate, knife crime, drugs, sex, class and race are all thrown into the mix, and the message is ...what? It is difficult to divine the intentions of writers Philip Osment and Jim Pope. But despite being thematically clumsy and rather too noisy, this brisk work should engage most.