IT was all going so well for posh, privileged Lucy, blossoming peachy presenter of CBBC's animal show.

Then, smack, her promising career turns to dust when she's caught smoking a heroin joint in her dressing room. Instant dismissal. The Beeb will cover it up for a while, but though Lucy (Anna Rogers) assures her mother (Jo Wragg) she would never inject, she is soon on the downward spiral from social drug habit to junkie dependency and desperate sexual favours, via a wastrel boyfriend and dodgy dealers (Joe Feeney, in several roles to emphasise the transience of men in her life).

Re-hab is a struggle too, no matter how much encouragement Lucy is given by her social worker (Jane Allanach) at a North London clinic. You've probably heard it all before, except not from the potty mouth of a posh girl (despite plenty of druggies from such circles). More often, junkie plays and stories focus on Trainspotting or Shameless "lowlifes", but David Eldridge taps into another world, no less troubled or valid for placing under the microscope for two hours.

 

York Press:

The needle and the damage done: heroin addict Lucy (Anna Rogers) experiences the lows of the highs in The Knot Of The Heart. Picture: Matt Oxberry Photography

The Knot Of The Heart is as much a study of fractured family relations as of drug dependency and despondency. The mother is never without a glass of red at her side and desperate to please her favourite daughter, even buying drugs for her. Lucy's elder sister, the anything but angelic Angela (Clancy McMullan), is a stuck-up lawyer, taciturn, bitter, emotionally bruised, loveless and unlovable. This is the stuff of a Greek tragedy, transported to modern-day London and a minor celebrity.

It turns out the elephant in the room is the premature death of the sisters' father in their childhood, a shattering finale to a frank, fearless and engrossing play of home truths and occasionally the very darkest humour in Eldridge's lyrical study of the self-destruction that has blighted all three.

All performances in Anna-Siobhan Wilcox's audacious, stark production for York company Anonymous Bosh are top-notch, especially Anna Rogers, who gives her best yet in this high point of Love Arts, York's week-long mental health festival and conference.