Scarborough ( Archived )

Reviews

5 stars Michael Coveney, Whats On Stag, Tuesday 12th February 2008

Fiona Evans’ expanded import from last year’s Edinburgh Festival fringe (a Northern Firebrand production first seen in Newcastle in October 2006) goes behind the headlines of teachers seducing pupils and those court reports where you can never really glean the truth. How can you believe who made the first move? Does love never come into it?

Scarborough is a deeply humane and very touching response to the wider diagnosis stated in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys: that eroticism is part and parcel of the teacher/pupil relationship, and always has been. In Part One, 15-year-old Daz (Jack O’Connell) and his 29-year-old PE teacher Lauren (Holly Atkins) prepare to hit the high spots.

In the new added Part Two, with virtually the identical text, in the same dismal Scarborough B&B, 15-year-old Beth (Rebecca Ryan) and her PE teacher Aidan (Daniel Mays) do likewise. The ‘‘dirty weekend’‘ euphoria on the brink of the student’s 16th birthday gives way to doubt, heartache, and a promise that the teacher’s secret is safe: memory deleted.

The play rings truer and more poignant in the first half; the repeat version is just as brilliantly acted but more familiar, more sordid, more Humbert and Lolita. Older men taking advantage of young girls is a more common occurrence than the desperate, unorthodox situation Lauren has encouraged. And Beth is far more knowing and manipulative than Daz, who is, perhaps, an unlikely, gawky, pimply object of the teachers affections.

None of this detracts from the pleasure of watching Deborah Bruce’s production, which is like watching the one dance piece with different choreography. The audience is herded into the upstairs studio, transformed by designer Jo Newberry into one of those seaside bedrooms where time has stood still and style has been strangled: rose-patterned wallpaper, cheap carpet and furnishings, plates on the wall (including one of Charles and Di).

The audience perches on windowsills, or the odd chair, or the cabinet, or the sideboard, or on the raised area by the window, where sunlight streams through net curtains. The environmental setting makes eavesdropping voyeurs of us all, even when a character retires to the offstage bathroom, still visible through the glass door.

There’s not one kink or false note in the writing, which is energised by such incidents as the giving of a present, the surprise news that the headmaster is prowling the promenade, or an exchange about clouds, what’s inside them? The naturalistic acting is of a calibre unmatched in London, with the tall and gangly Mays adding a wild and scary drunken incursion for good measure in the second part. The unaccredited soundtrack is superb, too. 5 stars ??Paul Taylor, The Independent, Wednesday, 13th February 2008 ??

Fiona Evans’s play _Scarborough _won a Fringe First at last year’s Edinburgh Festival, where it was a talking point because of its subject-matter a dirty weekend in a Scarborough B&B involving a female PE teacher and a pupil 14 years her junior and the uncomfortable intimacy of its staging. A tiny space was transformed into a dingy room in a faded seaside guesthouse, with the audience, turned into voyeurs, pinned against the walls.

I didn’t see the piece in Edinburgh, so I am glad to catch up with Deborah Bruce’s melancholy production at the Royal Court. While you would be capable of swinging a cat in the Theatre Upstairs, an atmosphere of physically and morally awkward closeness has been artfully preserved.

In Jo Newberry’s evocatively sad setting, with its peeling floral wallpaper and Charles and Diana wedding plates, there’s still a strong sense of strain. Pretending to be invisible in what looks like a case of extreme over-booking, the crammed-in audience violates the privacy of the unsuspecting pair.

A new twist, though, has been added to the play since Edinburgh. There is now a second half in which the 40-minute drama from before the interval is reprised in its entirety, except that the PE teacher is now male and the pupil female.

All four actors Holly Atkins and Jack O’Connell to begin with; Daniel Mays and Rebecca Ryan in the gender-reversed re-run give truthful performances that hit bang-on the notes of bleak, bantering comedy and encroaching desolation. If I found the first half more moving, it was because I wondered whether this about-face repetition has any deep diagnostic value.

O’Connell’s teenage Daz comes across as less emotionally mature than his female counterpart (Ryan). He’s a boy trying to act like a man. By contrast, Ryan’s pert, glammed-up Beth has a self-possession and a moral power that eventually allow her to sit in judgement over Mays’s desperately back-tracking Aiden. There are moments when you might think he was the younger party.

You never get that impression from Atkins’s excellent Lauren. She shows you an insecure woman torn between Daz and the older fianc who (ironically) took over her life while he was her swimming coach. She knows that time is running out, and not only in this doomed affair. 5 stars Sarah Hemming, Financial Times, February 13th 2008

For this, the London premiere of Fiona Evans’ play (seen at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe), the Royal Court’s upstairs space has been completely transformed. The entire auditorium has become a seaside B&B bedroom. The floral wallpaper, padded ottomans, even the patch of damp on the wall all are recreated in loving detail in Jo Newberry’s design. Members of the audience become part of the furniture, perching on the window-ledge or sitting on the sideboards. We are all, then, uncomfortably close, in every respect, to the drama played out among us.

We peep in on a romantic weekend away. But this is a deeply disturbing seaside break, because one of the parties is a teacher, the other a 15-year-old pupil. In Edinburgh, the teacher was female and the pupil male. Here that scenario is repeated, but Evans also adds a second half, in which the roles are reversed: the same text is played out by a male teacher and female student. The differences are subtle, but the net result is the same: heartbreak for the child, bitter regret for the adult.

And what makes the play is that Evans concentrates not on the sex but on the psychological backdrop and emotional fallout of the relationship. Thus we understand the fatal attraction between the child (Jack O’Connell; Rebecca Ryan) desperate to be an adult and the adult (Holly Atkins; Daniel Mays) who is afraid to grow up but we also see the damage done. The play charts the progress of the weekend from conspiratorial intimacy to sour recrimination. There is betrayal of trust on many levels here, but the biggest of all is in the chasm between the two parties’ expectations. The pupil falls hopelessly in love with the teacher; by failing to anticipate this, the adult leaves the pupil deeply disillusioned.

Evans picks her way through this minefield with refreshing psychological honesty and touching humour. One crucial conversation keeps stalling because the teenager is so absorbed in playing games on a gadget. Deborah Bruce’s production, though not always audible, deftly brings out the pupils’ differing responses to their heartbreak: Daz disguises his vulnerability with anger; Beth dissolves into tears. Poignantly acted by all four of the cast, the play asks many unsettling questions about what it means to be adult.