Fringe theatre can sometimes seem London-centric , so it’s great to see Daniel Hoffman-Gill’s East Midlands-crafted (and casted) coming-of-age drama bedding in for a three-week stint.
It traces the lives of rebellious middle-class kid Danny (Jarrod Cooke) and his cheery but troubled estate friend Michael (Dimeji Sadiq), from the moment they (literally) bump into each other in the street as 12 year olds in 1988, until a funeral four years later.
Nimbly directed by Laura Farnworth, it’s crisply evocative of a time and place: Hoffman-Gill has a good ear for Notts dialect, ’80s slang and the peculiar conversational tics and logic of teenage boys, but he doesn’t lay it on too thick. He makes effective deployment of the rise of rave culture as a backdrop to Michael and Danny’s difficult, in many ways depressing, advance toward adulthood.
Evocative as it may be, however, it never musters an exact point. And James Hooten’s Frank-from-‘Shameless’-alike narrator The Swinging Man is a distractingly superflous embellishment.