A 15-year-old Geordie high school student embarks on a dirty weekend in Scarborough, in a chintzy hotel room, with their PE teacher. You’d think it’d be a recipe for scandal, thrown tea-cups and drama, but Scarborough is actually a fairly quiet, detailed, and very human, theatrical examination of an intense but unsustainable love affair.
Performed in two parts with the gender roles swapped, The Honeytrap’s production is ably assisted by some beautiful set design by Casey-Scott Corless – a floral bedroom, last decorated by someone with matronly sensibilities circa 1986, re-created on a large pile of sand, accompanied by the sounds of the beach and surrounded by flip-down metal seat banks of the kind one finds in a slightly down-at-heels secondary school.
Into this desert-island hotel room come PE teacher Lauren (Joanne Redfearn) and high school lothario Daz (Matthew Connell), who make out, tread on each other’s sensitivities, bicker and make up about pointless things and very serious things indeed. Daz’s carefree attitude wars with Lauren’s ever-present paranoia and constant awareness of the world outside. The pair are well-cast by director Celeste Markwell, and bring humour and humanity to the roles, despite a slightly stilted start.
In part two, Doug Lyons takes over the role of PE teacher Aiden, while Libby Brockman takes over the PSP-playing teen as 15-going-on-16 Beth. Both acquit themselves excellently, managing to sustain humour and interest despite us having just heard all their lines before. This da capo version of the work is directed by Loren de Jong, and manages to create distinctly different personalities and a more melancholy sensibility.
Despite the sensational subject matter, Scarborough is almost free of sensationalism. There’s no great sense of inequality between the characters: while the older of the pair has money and resources, in fact, the PE teacher’s helpless terror of discovery seems to hand power over to the first-move-making, nothing-risking teen in the relationship. The barest mention of paedophilia comes from a for-a-laugh line where the two casually discuss that child molesters should be locked up and the key thrown away before moving on, oblivious to the irony.
In fact, by the end of the work, it seems difficult to understand why these two lovers can’t work things out – doubly difficult, given the play’s small (but not entirely unexpected) reveal. The switched genders make surprisingly little difference to the roles of the characters, despite what one might expect; writer Fiona Evans’ portrayal of the brash confidence, entitlement and obliviousness of youth versus the tired, longing, scale-free eyes of experience shines through much more strongly than any clothes or genders the performers might be wearing. The script tends much more to the realistic than to any rapier insights, and it’s not hard to imagine that these people might exist somewhere.
Weighing in at 75 minutes, this isn’t a short work – rather a long time to spend watching the same thing twice – but fortunately, the quality of the performances is high enough to keep the audience keen, first to see how the story unfolds, and then in what small ways it unfolds differently. Scarborough leaves the audience with more moral conundrums than it addresses, but is an excellent vignette set in the thorny place between adolescence and adulthood.
Rating: 3½ stars out of 5
The Honeytrap present
Scarborough
Written by Fiona Evans
Directed by Loren de Jong and Celeste Markwell
Set Design: Casey-Scott Corless
Costume Design: Nicholas MacKinnon
Lighting Design: Jarrod Factor
Sound Design: Tom Backhaus
Stage Manager: Kasey Gambling
Production Manager: Debbie Zukerman
Performed by Libby Brockman, Matthew Connell, Doug Lyons and Joanne Redfearn
Brunswick Arts Space, Brunswick
May 2 – 18
