This curious 70-minute play by Kenneth Emson, presented in association with the Mercury theatre, Colchester, offers a bleak vision of life in Essex. The setting is a small Thames Estuary town of limited chances and failed dreams. Forsaking linear narrative, Emson filters events through the memory of his four characters, who speak in jagged, colloquial rhyme, but while the result is weirdly fascinating I never felt the climactic violence was wholly believable.
We are, however, gradually drawn into Emson’s world, in which past traumas are re-enacted.
They involve Kev, a teenage football hero eagerly anticipating a decisive date with the 15-year-old Lisa. But on the day of the date, Lisa bunks off school for the afternoon with Ben and Jack, two kids she has grown up with but who are regarded as freaky outsiders by their classmates. The threat of violence hangs in the air, not least as Ben solemnly intones a litany of notorious American schoolroom slaughters, and you know something fearful might happen. But while Emson is good at conveying the impotent anger of the bullied and abused, I found it hard to credit his resolution: he seems to suggest that the “shitty little town” in which all the characters have been reared is the ultimate source of their troubles.
Josh Roche directs well, Sophie Thomas and Peter Small are jointly responsible for an ingenious design in which light-bulbs whizz through the air on overhead cables, and Mark Weinman, Madison Clare, Thomas Coombes and Louis Greatorex all give good performances. I suspect the play will lodge in the mind even if I question its fatalistic assumption that to be born in small-town Essex is to be deprived of all hope.
- At the Old Red Lion, London, until 21 April. Box office: 0333-012 4963. At the Mercury, Colchester, from April 26 to 28. Box office: 01206 573948.
