One-woman play makes visible the female faces of cuts to our public spending | Alison Benjamin

Joanne, at the Soho Theatre, depicts five women at the frontline of overstretched public services dealing with the fallout from one unseen young woman's life

"This is the bit of the job I love. Loved. The human-contact bit, the breaking-the-ice bit. The breaking-into-a-smile bit," says Stella, played by Tanya Moodie, a social worker whose project funding has run out just as she is trying to help a vulnerable young woman, called Joanne.

Stella is one of five characters in a five-act play depicting women at the frontline of overstretched public services. There's also a police officer with a troubled past, an NHS receptionist working nights in A&E for just 9 an hour, the manager of a homeless hostel who's mopping the rooms because the cleaner is off with stress and agency staff cost too much, and a teacher, haunted by the memory of a vulnerable pupil she wished she'd been able to help, called Joanne (yes, the same one). We never see this young woman, but she draws together each of the separate monologues, written by five different playwrights, and is the name of the play being staged in London by award-winning theatre company, Clean Break.

Related: Joanne review - angry sketches of the invisible woman

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