The fizzing energy of a school coach trip. The gentle escape of a dip in the ocean. The uncorked mayhem of a sweet-fuelled dash around a shopping mall. Kit Withington’s new play is a surprisingly innocent montage about teenage friendship. There are no drugs. No sex. Just a smattering of alcohol.
The plot revolves around the death of a fellow student during a school trip and the lingering impact of that tragedy, but the death itself feels secondary. Instead, Withington’s compassionate play is about the peculiar togetherness of those teenage years, all we stand to lose when we grow up, and the nostalgia that many of us feel, years later, for the way things were.
The play is written as a running narrative, so that the teenagers are forever commenting on their lives (“A lot happens next”) rather than fully inhabiting them. The action is split between the time around the fateful trip and 10 years on, with the gang gathering to remember their dead friend. Occasionally this narrative approach slows things down; not every last moment needs to be observed and preserved. But mostly it feels like a generous gesture – a chance for these teenagers to offer their direct, unfiltered perspective on events.
Withington’s writing is refreshingly understated with an elegant honesty, such as when a young parent remarks in wonder: “I am a mum. A whole mother.” The show is peppered with the kind of quirky details that feel slight in retrospect but can hold such a strange sway over our teenage years (Michael is wearing jeans at the weekend! Cole secretly loves Jessie J!)
There’s a warmth and ease amid the large ensemble cast, all drawn from the Bush Young Company, aged between 18 and 25, and directed with lovely restraint by Katie Greenall and Lynette Linton. The cast’s ability is mixed and there are some projection and pacing issues throughout, but the best performers have a striking openness. Sara Dawood is the epitome of lost innocence as the coddled daughter whose world darkens after her friend’s death. James Walsh’s Cole seems suspended between two worlds as he remembers his much-loved friend, his eyes visibly glowing as he yearns for another – simpler and more hopeful – time.
At Bush theatre, London, 24-26 August
