[title]
There’s been an incident with a hammer. A kid’s been attacked on Brighton beach by a young boy. Through police interviews and flashbacks, Alex Gwyther’s play jigsaw-puzzles together what happened.
Unfortunately the pieces never quite fit together. Derek Anderson’s production swings into a slightly twee evocation of an unlikely pre-teen friendship between fragile, anorak-wearing Seb and his tough-nut mate Aaron, who takes him under his wing. They bunk off school in Woking to go to Brighton. Seb wants to meet his mum there; he’s convinced he made her so ill that she had to leave.
There are sinister hints in Aaron’s protectiveness of his mate, but the first half of the play is mostly a strenuous attempt at pubescent boisterousness. Former ‘EastEnders’ actor Danny-Boy Hatchard is good at suggesting rage just beneath the surface, but he never quite convinces as a teen. Playing Seb, Joe Idris-Roberts finds the appropriate stooped awkwardness, all finger-twisting and huge haunted eyes; when he flashes a frog-like, wide, goofy smile, the audience melts into sympathetic laughter.
Things get considerably more interesting in the second half when it is Seb rather than Aaron being interviewed by police. As he recalls time spent with his mum, and hiding from his dad, an image forms of a young man traumatised by domestic abuse. Strange little echoes between the two halves begin to multiply, and it emerges that Aaron and Seb’s friendship isn’t all it seems.
The structure is neat, and Gwyther exhibits good control in slowly revealing what he’s playing at. But ultimately he just goes way overboard: despite Idris-Roberts’s impressive performance, the extreme violence of the ending doesn’t feel remotely plausible or earned. Or, in fact, necessary. There’s quite enough drama going on without it, and Gwyther’s writing, which has a low-key naturalism, certainly lends itself more to a character study than a great tragic denouement.