Breakfast Plays: Clean

Two years ago some bloke who wrote the dialogue for some guns and gangsters video games told Sabrina Mahfouz that the reason there were so few women in his games was because women didn't have adventures. Or not exciting, Tarantino-style adventures, anyway. Clean is Mahfouz's attempt to set him straight, but it's woefully insufficient as an argument and fails on almost every level as a comic rebuttal.

It's a London heist drama with three thinly sketched master criminals. The twist is that they're all women. The other twist is that they only commit "clean crimes", not exactly victimless, but with a heavily reduced level of ultra-violence. They're drawn into an improbable operation to steal a microchip containing the only copy of an underworld big cheese's precious new video game.

Mahfouz's entire project is undermined by the flaccidity of the adventure, with jabs at spy clichés and video games that are both uninformed and out of date. A far cry from Grand Theft Auto, the adventure that's presumably intended to be empowering has all the punch of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.

The backstory of Zainab provides the only high-score. Emma Dennis-Edwards gives a fierce but fragile portrayal of the 24-year-old card cloner who looks forward to returning to her Muslim parents without her headscarf once she's proved her worth in the world with filthy lucre.

Clean was written in a handful of days and it's over in less than an hour, but if you miss it, you won't miss much.