The Alphabet Girl

The adage that your parents fuck you up is taken to extremes in this patchy one-woman show, acted by Kaitlin Howard and written and directed by Renny Krupinski. It follows three generations of women, as they pass down an increasingly poisonous legacy of failed relationships and frustrated lives - until the buck stops with the titular Alphabet Girl.

Krupinski won a Fringe First in 2010 for Bare, but this play veers all over the place in terms of quality. Divided into three parts, the best is the first, in which Howard assumes the fur-coated mantle of Alphabet Girl's grandmother. Gin and blackcurrant in hand, she's hardened by life and has a rich story to tell of her Jewish father's emigration and her mother's neglect. It's evocative and vividly written.

But while Howard slips into this role with easy, believable disillusionment, she seems less comfortable as Alphabet Girl's highly strung mum, tortured by her own mother's resentful, embittered stealing of her boyfriends. It's a fairly one-note performance of a monologue that lacks the emotionally textured, historical sweep of what's gone before.

And things don't improve when we get to Alphabet Girl - so-called because she dates guys whose names have the same first letter as each month. There's plenty of dramatic scope in the psychological damage she's inherited, but Krupinski skims over the surface, sketching a garish cartoon of a woman. And a final, bizarre twist flattens the play as it strains for effect.