Tim Fountain bids to become drama's Philip Larkin. His wry, often moving poetic account of a teenaged vandal on community service and the old woman assigned to his care is unsensationalist. Polly Freeman's Alice is by turns coy and infuriating, her geriatric vamping inhabiting the spaces between Fountain's sparing, scalpel-precise words. At 23, he is already a writer to reckon with.
Written for The Independent.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.
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