What’s sweeter than childhood? According to Jess and Joe Forever, a gentle but full-bodied play by UK writer Zoe Cooper, a lot of things. Childhood friendship, on the other hand, and the first blushes of young love? You can’t beat it. Enter Jess and Joe.
Jess (Julia Robertson) and Joe (Nyx Calder) meet on the Norfolk coast when they are children. Joe is smaller than the other boys; Jess is teased for the way she looks in her summer dresses. Joe is working class and Jess’s lifestyle is worlds apart (ask her about her family’s ‘real’ holidays in Italy; ask Joe about digging holes for wooden fence posts). But they are two lonely souls, and they forge on ahead into a friendship. They bridle at each other occasionally, but they’re intensely fond of each other with the sudden but unshakeable conviction of children. It’s very charming.
Of course, life doesn’t run on charm alone, and as Cooper’s clear-eyed, beautifully constructed script unfolds, with Jess and Joe sharing narrating duties (occasionally bickering about what to include), life – in all its thorny, shaded complexity – seeps in.
Jess’s cavalier demeanour masks her anguish over family struggles – it all becomes harder to manage as she gets older – and Joe’s everyday caution proves well-founded when members of the community seek to tease the two friends and keep them apart. You get the sense that Joe is often held apart from the rest of the town.
But Jess isn’t the rest of town, and even when the friends fall out, you suspect they’ll find a way through it; the bond between Jess and Joe rises above the fray of daily life – not separate from it, but informed by it. Over the course of the play, which spans five years, we watch them learn themselves, and each other.
Directed by Shaun Rennie, whose productions consistently understand and emphasise the bittersweet emotion of yearning, especially in the queer tradition of outsiders finding their home outside the biological unit (and this is queer theatre, a new take on the idyllic boy-meets-girl), Jess and Joe Forever is a real winner. This production has an excellent balance of guilelessness and gravity and feels full and nourishing, even at only 70 minutes long. Rennie hews closely to the spirit of the script and treats its characters with great care. Every anxiety, childlike or not, is given the witnessing, and respect, it deserves. Isabel Hudson’s set, all sand and swings, is nostalgic and surprisingly dynamic: the whole world is here.
But Jess and Joe themselves are the critical elements of the play and Robertson and Calder have an easy, warm rapport. Robertson’s gung-ho expressiveness sits well in the form of take-charge Jess; she is witty and wounded in equal measure. But the quiet surprise is Calder’s Joe, who grounds the play with their more internal, but just as generous performance. It’s a pleasure to step inside their lives and watch them grapple with finding themselves amidst the noise of family, schools, bullies and secrets.
As the play moves towards its conclusion, we leave childhood behind. Jess and Joe, now young teenagers, regard themselves – and each other – differently: with a determined, impossible kind of hope. It’s winsome, it’s wistful, and as they reach out for each other, they seem to reach out for us too. Their friendship is healing – not just for Jess and Joe, but perhaps for us too.