SCARBOROUGH. To 8 March.

London.

SCARBOROUGH
by Fiona Evans.

Royal Court (Jerwood Theatre Upstairs) To 8 March 2008.
Mon-Wed; Fri-Sat 7.30pm Thu 5.30pm & 8.30pm.
BSL Signed 27 Feb.
Post-show talk 21 Feb.
Runs 2hr One interval.

TICKETS: 020 7565 5000.
www.royalcourttheatre.com (The Royal Court has announced this show is sold-out. Check with their ticket-office.)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 14 February.

Teacher and pet swimming against the tide in close-quarters seaside fling.
This piece (or the first act of its current form) appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year. Somewhere between conventional staging and a promenade performance, its 50-strong audience perches on furniture around the sides of the flowery-wallpapered, slightly shabby Scarborough boarding-house bedroom where a teacher and pupil are illicitly spending the weekend of the pupil’s 16th birthday.

This fly-on-the-wall staging was a noted aspect in Edinburgh, but as is the way with such ideas, it will be familiar to Theatre Upstairs regulars after the first half of ‘The Family Plays’ in December. Less a pioneering experiment now, more a local genre.

Scarborough also joins a select group including Strindberg’s The Stronger and Samuel Beckett’s Play where the script is to be played twice. Or almost so, as the original scene of female PE teacher Lauren in the boarding-house bedroom with teenage Daz recurs after the interval with male PE teacher Aiden shacked-up alongside young Beth.

It invites an exam-paper like Compare and Contrast. There are minor variations. The first play opens with a prologue on disenchanted Sunday afternoon before snapping back to rollicking Friday night. Its contrived closing line, about hating Sundays is more convincingly replaced by a second act epilogue.

Apart from convenience for a final bow, bringing the first pair silently back at the very end makes no point. For contrast wins out over comparison. Sometimes it’s the actors: Daniel Mays (a fine actor somewhat confined in this room and this role) keeps Beth waiting in mock horror before revealing the PSP to play the game he’s already given her, while Holly Atkins’ Lauren hands it straight over without the laddish suspense.

But the big gap shows between teenage boys and girls. Jack O’Connell’s fizzing Daz is testosterone on legs, energetic and confrontational, but right in his criticisms of his lover, aware she has a world elsewhere. Rebecca Ryan’s Beth is more composed, almost withdrawn at times, her emotions often more internalised, though no less intense. The assignation’s illegal (and suicide for the teachers’ jobs), the relationships as rocky as Scarborough’s coastline. But the dramatic contrast’s fascinating.

Lauren: Holly Atkins.
Daz: Jack O’Connell.
Aiden: Daniel Mays.
Beth: Rebecca Ryan.

Director: Deborah Bruce.
Designer: Jo Newberry.
Assistant director: Adaora Nwandu.

2008-02-19 12:33:01