BWW Reviews: MUDLARKS at the Hightide Festival

With the revival of 1980s levels of youth unemployment, one can expect drama that echoes the theatre of that decade (so watch out for a "Serious Money" style satire on a City-led economic revival come 2017). Mudlarks (at the Hightide Festival in Suffolk until May 13 and then at Theatre503 in London from May 29) owes something to Barrie Keeffe's Barbarians (recently at Tooting Arts Club and reviewed here), but packs a punch all of its own and marks the debut of Vickie Donoghue, a playwright to watch.

As in Barbarians, three adolescent lads from a sink estate meet at that point in their lives when their choices will determine their destinies. Charlie (James Marchant) has a penchant for casual violence now pecolating through a well-founded sense of alienation; Wayne (Mike Noble) is easily led and sees Charlie as the father figure he never had at home; and Jake (Scott Hazell) is becoming more detached from the pals as he builds his escape route through education. They meet to hide from police and plenty of others in a dilapidated boathouse on the muddy banks of the Thames near Tilbury (a brilliantly realised set by Amy Jane Crook). Slowly, their evening of high jinx is revealed as being rather more than that and the fracturing friendships fall apart.

Ms Donoghue's writing gives three fine actors the opportunity to create three wholly believable characters and they do not miss the chance. James Marchant has a sweaty, red-eyed look of desperation from the moment he tumbles on to the stage; Scott Hazell oscillates between the embrace of the good times in his old life and the temptation of his new one on the horizon with longing glances both ways; and Mike Noble gives a magnificently sensitive portrayal of a decent lad broken by circumstances, capturing a look and walk that took me right back to Brookside's loser kid Gizzmo Hawkins (that's a thirty year stretch). Ms Donoghue has done her research on what it's like to live by the docks (there's a lovely detail about missing the clanging of the containers being unloaded at night to which I can relate) and knows exactly how lads speak when they're together and alone.

If the play says nothing particularly new about the generation that shocked so many in last August's riots, it says what it says very well indeed. Mudlarks London debut at the end of this month will be timely, as the heat will again be building on the estates in more senses than one.