On the way out, I hear someone tell his friends he had been educated at Watson’s, the £17,000-a-year alma mater of Malcolm Rifkind and David Steel. Safe to say his schooling had little in common with that of Max and Stevie, the youngsters we met in the 2018 hit comedy Square Go, who are now en route to the Hammerston high school end-of-second-year disco.
In the first instalment, the boys were dealing with playground violence. In this sequel, playwrights Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair subject them to an equally excruciating rite of passage.
VL stands for virgin lips, the insult no teenager wants to be saddled with. Stevie claims to have lost his lip-virginity on a technicality; Max is holding out for tonight’s disco to get his chance. Both are more eager to escape the slur than actually kiss a girl.
Theirs is a world fraught with danger: from ogre-like teachers, from characters with names such as Joe the Bigot, Wee Cosa and Binbags, and from their own sexually developing bodies, ever likely to give them an inconvenient “pinger”. Max and Stevie are good boys, but this is a violent landscape, a crucible for machismo and misogyny, and it is all they can do to navigate the terrain without being caught.
Reprising their roles from Square Go, Scott Fletcher (Max) and Gavin Jon Wright (Stevie) are a sheer energy rush. Electrifying the audience, they enter in banana-yellow tracksuits, two misfits at a bus stop, firing out misconceptions, malapropisms and mad ideas. Directed by Orla O’Loughlin, Wright’s Stevie switches brilliantly from gawky schoolboy to roller-skating love interest to freestyle rapper, while poor Fletcher’s Max wrestles with fear and pubescent desire. Behind the hilarity, their vulnerability is touching.
Yes, it covers very similar ground to the prequel and, equally yes, it is a joy to be back in their company.
At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 26 August
