Winnie likes a Guinness on a Friday night (she’s Irish, after all), and the odd ciggie in the back yard. She loves a sing-song, and, if the tune is right, she’ll up and dance a jig before she’s even raised her glass to her lips. As stage nuns go, she’s the most credible I’ve ever seen. Except for, maybe, the swearing: “Shitting hell!” comes as a shock. Mind you, flying splinters of breaking glass and the dirty great lump of brick thudding by her feet on to the sitting-room carpet is a temptation to an expletive even a saint might find hard to resist.
Tom Wells has created a stormer of a central character for this not-so-everyday tale of Withernsea folk – the title puns on “folk” as “ordinary” people and “folk” as musical genre (musical director James Frewer cleverly intersperses his original compositions with familiar tunes). It’s the music that brings the stone-lobber, disaffected teenager Kayleigh, back again – at Winnie’s forgiving invitation – to the Friday night sessions shared by Winnie and her old friend Stephen, who is no longer young and lives at home with his dad.
As in Wells’s first play, Me, As a Penguin and his 2012, award-winning The Kitchen Sink, while the dialogue is vivid, the plot is, at times, forced. When this happens, we seem to be watching less a drama than a parable about the power of music to open up channels of communication. A playwrighting sin, perhaps, but mitigated, here, by the freshness and charm of Wells’s writing – and the warmth of Tessa Walker’s production.
And there’s Winnie! Connie Walker superbly brings her to sharp-eyed, soft-hearted, funny, faith-sustained, exasperated, bossy, stubborn, vibrant life. She is well supported by Patrick Bridgman, as her bashful fellow-in-folk (maybe, as yet, a little too restricted by Stephen’s repressedness), and by Chloe Harris, deftly transiting clashing teenage states of innocence and experience. Together, as they work through their various discords to harmony, this unlikely trinity brings to mind that old adage: there’s nowt so queer as…
• Folk is at Birmingham Rep until 30 April; at Hull Truck theatre, 3-14 May; and at Watford Palace theatre, 18-28 May
