Writer: Tim Foley
Directors: Tim Bettles and Elle While
There have been plenty of plays that focus on sibling rivalry, more specifically the return of the one who left to better him/herself in contrast to the one who stayed to look after the older generation/the business. However, few bring as much poetry to bear on the subject as Driftwood or toy so effectively with the blurred curtain that separates myth from reality. Few, for that matter, have as acute a sense of place and the threats to its existence.
Matt and Tiny, on the surface, are typical siblings in contrast. The older brother Mark left Seaton Carew and now works in media, is gay and apparently has little regard for his home town. Tiny has spent years as his father’s full-time carer. Now Mark returns as his father is dying, but doesn’t go to visit on what proves to be his father’s last night. Clearly the father each remembers is a very different person: Mark remembers a liar and a bully who mocked his homosexuality; Tiny remembers a story-teller. It’s these stories that take over Tiny’s mind as he refuses to attend the funeral. His father may be in his grave, but Tiny will not believe he is gone until the Mariner comes to take him away, as in his father’s tale.
The melodrama of the two brothers being engulfed by the sea, beautifully staged with Sarah Readman’s videos and Lee Affen’s sound, leads to a plateau of content – and here everything seems a bit too neat. For the first 75 minutes all the different elements cohere thanks to Tim Foley’s writing (with elements of the absurd and the comic to relieve the tension) and the undemonstrative direction by Tim Bettles of ThickSkin and Elle White of Pentabus. Readman’s captions of the text, projected onto her videos of the beach or the deserted steelworks, are an inspiration.
Above all, however, it’s the integrity of the performances of James Westphal (Mark) and Jerome Yates (Tiny) that grabs the audience’s attention. Spanning the range of emotions from fury at the other’s neglect of the pain of death/obsession with the Mariner and the ghost ship, The Stag, to throwaway fun at the limitations of “the caff”, they are constantly convincing.
Despite the mythical and historical (the Vikings) overtones Driftwood could only have been written in 2023, the time of the first tour. Tim Foley’s indignation at the massacre of marine life after the building of the Freeport is palpable and the final paragraph of his revised acknowledgements of 2025 refers to “the North East ecocide”. No answers yet – maybe the new government?
Reviewed on 18th March 2025. Touring the UK.
