A knife to his throat as teenagers meet in a dangerous world...

The opening line of The Silence and The Noise came to playwright Tom Powell as he walked along a train station platform.

“I just heard the line as if there was someone there – ‘I could hurt you, you know, and maybe I want to.’ I looked around and there was no one there, and actually I knew that there was no one there. I knew it was fully in my imagination.

“But actually it's a similar line to a line that was in my first play and I just knew that someone else was saying it. I spent a bit of time thinking about who the characters were and why they were saying it and after two or three days thinking about it, these two teenagers walked into my life and sort of told me the rest of the play.”

That play is The Silence and the Noise, a Papatango Theatre Company and Pentabus production, directed by George Turvey, playing in Chichester’s Minerva Theatre from

Tuesday-Saturday, November 17-21, featuring just two actors, both on professional debut,

Joe Dolan as Ben and Deborah Olat as Daize.

“That first line is said by Daize. She starts the play by holding a knife at his throat in her back garden. She does not know why he is there but she is brave. She's got a very dry sense of humour and she has had to take a lot more responsibility in her life than you would imagine. This is her attempt to defend herself and to protect her mum from this strange teenage boy Ben, this cocky young kid who is there in the back garden.

“Ben thinks he has got the best job in the world. He has been given loads of money to move things from one place to another. But these teenagers meet. They are natural enemies in a way. The gang are cuckooing her mother's house. Cuckooing is where a group of dealers take over the home of someone that is vulnerable and use it as a base for whatever activity they are up to, usually storing and selling drugs. Ben is a foot soldier in an operation that is cuckooing Daize’s mother's house.”

The play is what happens between them: “They are the only ones that know what the other is going through.”

The piece plays straight through in just over an hour with no interval: “We're inviting the audience to be with them in the most intimate and dangerous and funny parts of their lives. I don't want to break that up by having an interval. I think you gain intensity from not having an interval. Each scene has to feel like a boxing match, and hopefully it builds and builds.”

The play ultimately is about hope: “It's a play for people that want to understand the pressures that young men experience and the difficult situations that young women can be put in. It's about the power of connection in challenging circumstances. The off-stage world is challenging for them but there is something really hopeful about the ability of two people to care for and about each other under extreme duress.”

Can two neglected teenagers change their destinies? These natural enemies start to find something in each other no adult has ever given them…