Luton has one of the youngest populations in the country. Playwright Sam Edmunds gives us a teens’-eye view of the town in the 00s with this arresting account of a house party, from pre-drinks and banter to bangers and dazed aftermath. Co-directed by Edmunds and Vikesh Godhwani for Chalk Line theatre company, it brims with boisterousness while vividly capturing a sense of waning nonchalance in late adolescence amid the daunting approach of adulthood.
And talk about making an entrance: playing best mates, Olatunji Ayofe and Elan Butler bum-rush this show, whooping up the audience. Along with Amaia Naima Aguinaga, who provides a handful of supporting characters, they continually pop out from behind the brick wall blocks of Rob Miles’s set. The soundtrack’s beats are accompanied by chest thumps and banged fists, with Matteo Depares’s sound design adding extra pace to the hour.
The three performers have an often cartoonish physicality yet the key relationships here are affectingly authentic. There is a heart-bursting encounter between Ayofe and Aguinaga whose embrace at the party is represented by the pair touching palms, evoking Romeo and Juliet’s holy palmers’ kiss as this story of violent delights races towards its own violent end.
There’s an air of Liam Williams’ Ladhood to episodes such as the boys’ search for someone to buy them booze from the corner shop and their regular swerves from embarrassment to ebullience. Edmunds includes more social commentary, mostly managing to embed those observations in the plot and make them ring true for the characters: the almost physical effects of carrying debt, for example, or the inability to make life-changing choices when you can barely get by in the norm.
There is a richly detailed 00s teen world – Lynx spray and Tinie Tempah, Blackberrys and fake Ralph Laurens – and as believable a bond between the trio as that in Tyrell Williams’s Red Pitch. It matches that play’s evocative sense of a community’s energy (“the heartbeat of our endz”), adding some well-selected anecdotes from Luton’s history. Edmunds also gives an eloquent assessment of how fear can result in fury. But the key note is hope and you can’t help but love a show whose narrator breaks off the story to join in with the others’ dance moves.
At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 26 August
