Fran & Leni

“Lades have to sound like ladies” – apparently. These two don’t. Francesca Jane and Eleanor Rose are Fran and Leni – punk band The Rips to the world, queens of the London punk scene. To each other: Ludwig and Amadeus. “Why don’t girls get names like that?”

Sadie Hasler’s two-hander tells the story of the fictional feminist punk duo. Framed by a new autobiography, it looks back to the detention where two schoolgirls met: Leni stomping about in DMs, Fran tinkling the ivories and considering a classical career. From thereon in, they’re “tight as babies arseholes.”

At heart, it’s a story of friendship—“spit sisters or summink”—but Fran & Leni celebrates women behaving badly. The duo bait music hacks and piss standing up, but for all music offers escape, even they can’t tear through society’s sexism.

If Fran & Leni asks what happens when punk rage hits middle age, it also links two sides of the Seventies. Hasler suggests that the culture of unreported sexual abuse now being investigated under the Yewtree banner spawned a wave of feminist punks. Dog collars and shaved heads fend off unwanted attention from “dirty old blokes who try it on with everything.”

For a play about punk though, it’s pretty damn conventional, working through the old tropes of dodgy managers, daddy issues and schisms that lead to splits. Sappy too; so pared back that it gives no sense of the punk scene and its wild, frazzled edge. What’s missing? The music. Without blaring guitars and hoarse screams, Fran & Leni can’t summon the anger it describes.