I CAUGHT CRABS IN WALBERSWICK. To 6 December.

London.

I CAUGHT CRABS IN WALBERSWICK
by Joel Horwood.

Bush Theatre To 6 December 2008.
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Sat 3pm.
Runs 1hr 15min No 8interval.

TICKETS: 020 8743 5050.
www.bushtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 17 November.

Nothing crusty or crustacean about this show.
Which came first: title or play? The Crabs, in both senses, seem shoe-horned in and even Walberswick, focus of a class and culture micro-climate on Suffolk’s coast, is a background to offset Wheeler and Fitz. They’re GCSE-age lads from slightly less upmarket Reydon who meet up with “Hampstead-on-Sea” Walberswick teenager Daniella (“It’s Dani,” she sharply reminds parents).

This youthful trio, and especially the lads, are what the play’s about. Their parents are all but anonymous as Andrew Barron and Rosie Thomson swap between them, always in a separate world from the young, portraying fragments of variously distraught, collapsed or pretentious lives; broken-down, irrelevant or worst of all embarrassing in a failed attempt to copy the language of the young.

Though playwright Joel Horwood doesn’t emphasise the point, it’s a cloud over the teenagers’ zipping energy that this is the kind of future probably in store for them. What Horwood shows is the final parting of the ways for Fitz and Wheeler; the wrenching apart of childhood friendships as young personalities develop – a female version of such a twosome cropped up recently at Liverpool Playhouse in Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s Proper Clever.

Meanwhile, there’s high-energy speed through the night Fitz and Wheeler meet Dani. Her upper-bourgeois assurance fires them into forgetfulness of mundane exam commitments, with a class-based assurance that adds to her physical confidence to confuse them further.

Their lives skid around with a physical energy on stage that matches the boys’ emotional volatility. Fitz remains the more confident, Wheeler trying it on with an apparent car theft that fails to fool his friend. Their hard-driven feelings find a mirror in Lucy Kerbel’s high-octane production, with its convincingly cinematic cuts between the generations, and the fast-shifting locations of the teenage trio’s night out.

Fine performances all round, Barron and Thomson faithfully rotating through adult failures, while Harry Hepple and Aaron Foy contrast Wheeler’s willing efforts to succeed and Fitz’s natural authority. Gemma Soul has the confident swagger of affluence, confidence and attractiveness in this Bush visit from Suffolk’s Eastern Angles in a show first seen at the county’s Hightide Festival last May.

One: Andrew Barron.
Two: Rosie Thomson.
Wheeler: Harry Hepple.
Fitz: Aaron Foy.
Dani: Gemma Soul.

Director: Lucy Kerbel.
Designer: Takis.
Lighting: Matt Prentice.
Sound: Steve Mayo.
Movement: Shona Morris.
Dramaturgy: Beth Byrne.

2008-11-28 23:56:37