Kate, Sam and Pete live in a town made for leaving. The unnamed setting of Simon Longman’s play is a dead-end place, robbed of jobs and hope, where getting drunk is the only way to pass the time. Sam’s focused on survival, while Pete just wants to get laid. Only Kate plans to escape – if the town will let her.
Longman’s play, like the lives of his teenage characters, goes round in circles. Caught in the noose of the ring road around the town, Kate, Sam and Pete seem doomed to repeat the same destructive behaviours, reliving the limited experiences of the generations that came before. In the encircling space of Paines Plough’s Roundabout theatre, Stef O’Driscoll’s staging creates a clammy sense of imprisonment, making us feel the constraints of geography and circumstance. Surrounded by the audience on all sides, the three performers pace like animals in a cage.
Though repetition is deliberately built into the play’s structure, some of Longman’s themes wear thin from overuse. There are only so many ways to describe the limited horizons of small-town life or the desperate yearning to get away. And the political swipes at austerity feel heavy-handed, pressing home what’s already made clear enough by the poverty of ambition and opportunity in this grey every-town.
The sustained energy of this merry-go-round of strangled dreams owes a lot to the untiring trio of performers. Charlotte O’Leary and Jack Wilkinson are both impressive, but Katherine Pearce as Kate is the emotional pulse of the piece, writhing inside her own skin as she struggles to break free of the town that has raised and broken her.
There are times when Island Town is close to becoming a two-dimensional portrait of “left behind” Britain, but it is lifted by its characters and its humour. Kate, Sam and Pete are vivid personas from the moment we meet them, slugging cider and taking the piss out of each other. The laughs keep coming until suddenly, with a shock, they start to feel like kicks to the gut.
- At the Roundabout @ Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 26 August.
