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Actor-turned-writer Philip Correia’s first play looks at how trying to find a place to call home can be dangerous. It’s set in Newcastle – hence the Geordie ‘Hyem’ – where a 13-year-old boy washes up in the living room of a boozy, chaotic middle-aged couple.
Mick and Sylv hold a kind of open house for lost teenagers, letting them drink cheap cider, make out or lark about with their pet python. It’s obviously pretty dangerous. But Correia’s play never slips into to the expected territory of grooming or drug-running. Instead, it’s basically a Tyneside ‘Jerusalem’, where a charismatic, misunderstood outsider provides a cosy refuge for young misfits, against a backdrop of disapproval from the world outside.
At a time when more and more cases of teenagers being groomed for sex are coming to light, this story sits a little strangely. The uneven trajectory of its narrative doesn’t help, either: a muddled storyline throws out and drops hints of some hidden menace, without quite deciding if it’s located inside or outside the flat’s walls.
For all that, ‘Hyem’ has a fascination to it, and that mostly comes from its authentic, warm-hearted portraits of young teenagers. Ryan Nolan, Sarah Balfour and Aimée Kelly are effortlessly believable and likeable as three lost kids, unmissed by their parents and with nowhere else to go on their bleak Newcastle housing estate. And Charlie Hardwick (Val from ‘EastEnders’) is great as an intriguingly conflicted matriarch who’s not quite sure how they all ended up in her living room.
The central character of Mick (Patrick Driver) sounds a less authentic note, with his underexplored need for teenage company and his limitless stock of mockney witticisms. Still, this crew’s tense, uneasy interactions say something powerful about loneliness, and the strange bonds that form when you’re left out in the cold.