Natalie McGrath's three-hander, set in a dead-end seaside town in the late 1980s, begins with a great crash of waves and explodes in a dazzling firework shower of words. There's more than a touch of Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs in a play where Pearl and Ocean, the town's resident flotsam and jetsam, cling to each other like driftwood and indulge in their own richly baroque, semi-private language, or "linguistic jerk-offs" as local policewoman, Falcon, delicately puts it.
Falcon has got more than one reason to be interested in these waif and strays, particularly Pearl, but the obvious one is the dead body washed up early one morning on the beach, known locally as the Stretch. The night before, Pearl and Ocean were out on the Stretch, their brains addled as usual by "the little green men" supplied by local dealer and nasty piece of work, Doug. But maybe through the haze they glimpsed something on the horizon? And why is Ocean running scared and lashing out?
The fog doesn't entirely lift because the focus is more on the invisible crimes of the heart, the ties that bind us to place, and the loneliness of three people who share more than they might ever imagine. Like the script, Emily Watson Howes's production sometimes lacks clarity and mistakes noise for energy. But there is no mistaking the distinctive timbre of McGrath's voice and a real ability to capture the dead-fly desolation and bruised end-of-season melancholy of a place where survival requires the growth of a disguising skin. Helena Lymbery raises the tone and the tension in every scene in which she appears, and although the acoustics are not always kind to them, Tom Wainwright and Nadia Giscir are touchingly vulnerable as the youngsters adrift.
