We have become used to in-yer-face violence at the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs. But what is remarkable about Simon Stephens's play is that, while graphically acknowledging the nihilistic cruelty of East End schoolkids, it is also filled with a sense of life's miraculous potential. It deals with damaged characters yet is imbued with a poetic lyricism.
Stephens focuses on a watchful, wary 14-year-old called Billy. He loves herons, tench-fishing and, in a strange way, his scruffy, inarticulate dad, Charlie, for whose sake he has abandoned his violent mother. But Billy's devotion to Charlie is also his undoing. A year back his father publicly identified two men who drowned a teenage girl in the Lee river; now the killers' families, as part of their vendetta, seek to get back at the grassing Charlie by tormenting Billy.
In one horrendous scene the brutish brother of one of the killers rams a bottle up Billy's rectum. But Stephens is writing about a world in which cruelty and kindness oddly coexist. Parents are screwed up. Teachers, in hot weather, "treat you like wasps". And childhood innocence is a myth in an East End where kids swear like troopers and behave like gangland barons. Yet Stephens's Limehouse blues are offset by Charlie's obduracy, the puzzled friendship bestowed on him by a 13-year-old girl and the abundant variety of nature. It as if Edward Bond's world has been occupied by Wordsworth.
What Stephens finally suggests is that teenage violence stems from a fear of life's beauty. An arguable notion; but there is nothing remotely sentimental in the way he handles it nor in Simon Usher's spare, implacable production. He also gets from Billy Seymour as the hero the best performance I've seen from a boy actor since Ken Loach's Kes. Seymour's steady, unwavering gaze as he hears his parents coarsely trashed by bully-boys is astonishing to behold. And there is high-grade support from Nicolas Tennant as his rumpled dad, who achieves articulacy only when fishing, Lia Saville as his quizzical female friend and Robert Boulter as his teenage tormentor. An extraordinary evening that suggests that in east London good and evil exist in symbiotic closeness.
Until June 9. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
