Zoe Cooper’s play, co-produced with Farnham Maltings and destined for a regional tour, is well worth catching for its touching portrait of the awkward uncertainties of adolescence and the human potential for transformation. Even if the use of direct address sometimes feels ingratiating rather than experimental, Cooper skilfully offers a dramatic revelation that we realise was implicit from the start.
The story is told by the play’s two characters who re-create their lives from the age of nine to 15. Jess is a city girl who pays summer visits to the Norfolk countryside with her posh parents; Joe is the taciturn son of a widowed farmer who helps his dad work the land. Although their backgrounds could hardly be more different, the two kids form a strange friendship: one that survives the wrath of their parents, scandalises the village and is only cemented when the truth about Joe is disclosed.
I was reminded of two American novels – Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding and JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye – in that Cooper conveys the separate nature of an adolescent world full of secrets, anxiety and search for identity. She also has a sharp eye for the petty prejudices of village life and, even if the narrative form makes it seem as much like a classroom presentation as a play, Derek Bond’s production strikes a nice balance between rueful comedy and remembered pain.
Nicola Coughlan as the supposedly sophisticated Jess and Rhys Isaac-Jones as the shape-shifting Joe catch exactly the waywardness of a friendship that hovers on the edge of love.
- At the Orange Tree, Richmond, until 8 October. Box office: 020-8940 3633. On tour until 4 November.
