From the unlikely theatrical hotspot of Withernsea comes the latest of Tom Wells’s missives of marginalised east-Yorkshire folk uniting to celebrate their eccentricity. Meg, Holly and Ben are three chronically uncool school-leavers determined to reinvent themselves for the start of the college term by adopting the time-honoured route favoured by geeks, introverts and the socially maladjusted and forming a band.
In fact, it’s such a time-honoured route that Wells has been down it fairly recently: his last play, Folk, featured a trio of oddballs who found salvation by forming a ceilidh group. But if that was largely a play about age and missed opportunities, Broken Biscuits is a sweet meditation on the fierce, fragile alliances formed on the cusp of adulthood.
Like most fledgling rock bands, the group start out by trying other people’s material for size, in this case an apposite cover of Pulp’s Mis-Shapes in an unconventional drums/flute/laptop arrangement. But it isn’t long before Ben begins to find himself as a songwriter and pens a fey ode about his compulsion to put on a shocking pink fascinator and sparkly sheath dress.
James Grieve’s production, a collaboration between Live Theatre and Paines Plough, contains just the right amount of gauche charm without completely succumbing to whimsy. And there are incredibly endearing performances from Faye Christall, Grace Hogg-Robinson and Andrew Reed as the Biscuit chums – though you do wonder how many times Wells can return to the same source before reaching the bottom of the barrel.
- At Live theatre, Newcastle, until 22 October. Box office: 0191-232 1232. Then touring until 3 December.
