Antonia Franceschi: up from the waste, The Albany, Deptford, London

Don't believe the hype

I wish there were anything in Up from the Waste half as striking as the publicity photograph of its author and protagonist, Antonia Franceschi, in tights, ballet shoes and leather jacket, her blond hair loose, half-smiling as she sprawls across a motorbike. Sexy, what? Well, the show ain't really like that.

There is a lot of talk, about how she was raped at the age of eight (well, not successfully – "his dick was corrugated"); how her mother taught her to masturbate when she was 10, which seems a weird way of going on; and some enigmatic references to anal rape. It appears, too, that she learnt very young to talk dirty, and she has never stopped since.

Franceschi's less-than-original moral is that in New York you can find both gangs and performing arts schools, and you have a choice of which to go for. She wants us to know that she experienced both of those sides. Big deal. I must not blame the woman for finding herself an object of surpassing interest; many of us do that, but we don't pretend that our experiences justify public exposure.

Not that you could say that she has actually made a play of her life. Snippets of information and comment, spoken by Franceschi and her actress alter ego, Clare Holman, are jumbled together all higgledy-piggledy, with side-swipes such as her filthy abuse of someone who failed to smile on being told (over and over again), "You look good."

Just what the playwright Martin Sherman did to earn his credit as dramaturge isn't clear, and the presence of a director, Cecil O'Neal, does not do anything to shake off the amateurish feel of the whole thing. Gary Yershon wrote the recorded score, which is lively if obvious, but the choreography doesn't relate much to it.

Bits and bobs of dance are shoved in at every opportunity, and it has to be said that Franceschi has surrounded herself with some pretty good male dancers. David Justin, Alexandre Proia and William Smith, all of them Americans, do the active bits, and make a lot more of them than the mediocre choreography actually deserves. Another former dancer, Ian Knowles, is roped in to act the role of a ballet master; I hope nobody in the audience at the Albany imagined that this foul-mouthed bully was meant to represent Balanchine, who is referred to frequently in his capacity as the director of New York City Ballet.

Franceschi may well be a better dancer and actress than she shows herself to be here – it would be difficult otherwise, even allowing for a degree of possible hype, to account for the career she claims in stage musicals, films and ballet. I hope she can work on it before next year's national tour.