Writer and Director: Barney Norris
20 years ago, Salisbury teenagers Joe, Ellie and Ross were in a band together. But as school broke up for the last time, so did they. Ellie and Ross went off to university and had a brief relationship with each other, and Ellie’s ex-boyfriend Joe stayed in town.
In the modern day, James Westphal’s Joe organises a reunion in their home town for a benefit gig. He wants the money to go to a Novichok charity, referencing the 2018 attack by Russian agents on dissident Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. But there are no such charities – the town seems to have moved on, but he has not.
Joe’s inability to move on becomes a running theme as the trio gradually reassembles for a weekend of rehearsals. Starting the first act with a reunion between Joe and Ellie (Laura Evelyn), Barney Norris’s script adeptly captures the awkward silences, the hesitancy, and the detached familiarity.
There is also a sense of how much of one’s life in the decades apart does one reveal, the response to “How’ve you been” either being two words or a never-ending stream. As the pair tentatively discuss their adult lives, Norris’s direction supplements the actors’ delicate portrayals. Westphal’s closed-off introvert hovers behind the safety of a keyboard or a drum kit while Evelyn strides around the space, never settling.
The pair’s conversation expands when Ross (Royce Cronin), the only one of the trio to have stayed working in the music industry, finally arrives. The subtle change in dynamic is captured both by writer and cast, laying in subtle cues that this was less of a trio of teenagers and more of two boys who were each in thrall to the same girl.
But once the music starts – with a series of songs written by musical supervisor Tom Cook in collaboration with the cast – one gets a sense of the artistic glue that bound them together in their school days. Evelyn’s voice is crisp, clear and full of emotion, finding joy and darkness at every tempo. While the band never discusses their influences, it is not hard to imagine a group in the late 90s and early 2000s taking inspiration for the alt-rack from The Cranberries and other groups of the era.
One may question whether the teenage songwriters would have come up with lyrics quite as poignant and redolent with nostalgia as the numbers constructed for the play, but there is no denying their suitability and how well they elevate the mood and the tensions between the trio. In the second act, as the adult band members begin to open up about events they have never really discussed, the conversations feel like picking at scabs without knowing if what lies beneath is healed skin or still an open wound.
Throughout, Norris’s script tends to concentrate on Joe’s difficulties with his own mental health and that of people close to him. But when Ross and Ellie get a chance to talk alone and discuss the shared grief that helped them ease apart, both Evelyn and Cronin show a tender fragility that each of their characters tends to keep hidden around their bandmate.
As the band’s rehearsal time draws to an end and the trio discuss whether they’ll ever meet up again, their decision feels like a collective release of breath that had been held in for 20 years. As articulated by the band’s final numbers, our younger selves can cause intense love, regret and pain to each other – but life is made up of adventures with friends; however painful the memories may be, we take them with us everywhere we go.
Continues until 28 September 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Enthrallingly tender
