The most significant writer to emerge from Withernsea – let’s face it, the only writer to emerge from Withernsea – Tom Wells has quietly built up a reputation for sweet, compassionate plays about everyday folk from an east Yorkshire coastal town so remote its inhabitants consider Hornsea, up the coast, a metropolis.
It’s the kind of isolation that works to Wells’s advantage. As a dramatist he is not, and is unlikely ever to be, fashionable; and as a young man who writes about gay themes on the margins of Yorkshire he belongs to a minority within a minority. Yet it is this very sense of being cut adrift that makes his writing remarkable. His latest play, jointly produced by Birmingham Rep, Watford Palace and Hull Truck, doesn’t exactly break the mould. But it proves that Wells understands loners, losers and the loveless as well as any dramatist working today.
Winnie is a raucous nun given to most un-nunlike behaviour such as smoking, drinking and having a knees-up in the living room with her close friend Stephen, a middle-aged folk singer too shy to perform in public. “Sing me something holy,” she cackles, “something wholly inappropriate.”
They do not get as far as the second chorus before someone lobs a brick through the window – which seems a harsh form of criticism. Yet Winnie shows great forbearance to the teenage culprit, whom she recognises as a former pupil called Kayleigh who has no mother but is shortly to become one herself.
Stephen is baffled as to why Winnie should extend a warm welcome to someone who has just smashed their window; to be honest, I shared his confusion. But Kayleigh has an unexpected knack for the penny whistle, which prompts Winnie to excitedly formulate a club night entitled What the Folk.
In many respects, the play is as slender as the tale of three misfits rehearsing traditional jigs and airs suggests. Yet Wells tenderly draws attention to the manner in which the simple joy of sharing music enables Winnie, 35 years in holy orders and never been kissed; Stephen, a gay man living with his elderly father; and Kayleigh, whose life has been a series of false starts, to bond into a surrogate family.
Tessa Walker directs with the delicate hand a piece like this requires; and designer Bob Bailey has amassed a fine collection of Catholic tat, including all manner of car-boot icons and blushing images of Christ, which even the saviour looks embarrassed to appear in. Connie Walker is the life and soul as the incorrigible Winnie; Patrick Bridgman’s Stephen spends the entire evening crawling painfully out of his shell; and Chloe Harris’s Kayleigh manages to become the kind of juvenile vandal you can take to your heart.
It is, like all of Wells’s work, almost too self-effacing for its own good. Yet he has the priceless ability to endow the ordinary with luminous significance. Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand. Wells finds it in a pebble on Withernsea beach.
- At Birmingham Rep until 30 April. Box office: 0121-236 4455. Then at Hull Truck and Watford Palace.
