Utterly captivating, Sophie Woolley's middle-distance event cuts slices through the city, setting the pace of desperation, of adrenalin-fuelled running, a long lap around an empty centre. This is running away as belonging. On one layer 'When To Run' is a painfully funny and funnily painful relay race run unknowingly by four very different, very connected women. On another it is a race track cut into the corpus of contemporary living. Specifically hilarious, more generally profound.

Woolley's writing is adroit and spacious. She sets her characters in motion - a squeaky 15 year old aspiring super-athlete, unphased by the "Local Perverts' League", her hulky new date or Paula Radcliffe's mythic collapses in Athens, a damaged professional obsessively energy-testing her runs and speaking in zipped up, clipped prose, her shadow - a Botoxed 'life coach'- and then Woolley makes her most jumpy character an observer, bench-ridden, a restless dog-'sitter', watching much seeing little.

There is lots here of the body-politics of health, of exercise, of pulling skin over the bones, of tightness tuning the nerves higher, of trying to outrun one's devils, of joy through pain, shutting bodies like security gates. All this with warmth and affection for these struggling athletes of the soul. Never cynical about her portraits, for all the failings of her subjects.

Most extraordinary is Woolley's vision of the city at speed. The women seem to notice nothing but themselves when in motion. Only in a car does the place emerge from their shadows of their trajectories - as a "blur of buildings". The social networks of this hazy city are hilarious combined through a mobile phone, drawing all the racing strands together in murderous farce, around their almost always absent male centre. But this is no apotheosis: life remains community-less, communion-less, layers and lines, with the occasional sexual spike. A city locked in the sentence: " I love me!" What Sophie Woolley has done is create a warm-hearted comedy in a deeply fragmented, but not un-connected world. This is not the Complex that is not complicated, but an aspiration to the simple healthy life that is stuck like an electronic bug in a social matrix. Stunning in its poetic and imagistic reach, always open and funny - don't mistake its modesty for lack of ambition: this is an urban epic, a marathon of city and emotions that Woolley makes as easy on the audience as a stroll in the park - but a dangerous park.

Download review as word document (28K)