Review: DRIFTING, Southwark Playhouse

There’s a moment during Andrew Muir’s Drifting,  when I may have spotted one of those inconsistencies that can derail a whole evening, at least for me. Having been berated by Father for wasting time and money at uni, the Young Man later confesses to never having been on a train, still less having ventured beyond the small seaside town in which he is stuck. It’s possible, but unlikely, that it hosts a university.

But, in many ways, that was the making of this new play from Ardent Theatre Company, because I realised that this was not a 21st century kitchen sink drama grounded in Ibsenesque realism, but much more a fever dream of a Ballardian environment within which the characters’ alienation is so overwhelming that reality floats free of earthly concerns. 

It’s not quite a nightmare, as hope keeps poking through the ennui, signposting another escape route that leads to a dead end. The traditional three act narrative structure continually threatens to impose itself before the Young Man finds himself, geographically and psychologically, back where he started. He is, albeit with a very different aesthetic, Number Six in The Prisoner with echoes of Mersault in the Camus’ L'Étranger, another occupant of a seashore’s liminal, sinking space.  

It’s not all surreal vignettes, source material for comparative literature courses, much of the dialogue is in the raw argot of twentysomethings who realise that nothing is happening in their lives, that they want to press Ctrl-Alt-Delete but don’t know how. This is life passing when you’re making other plans. It is episodic though, the Young Man (Trae Walsh) impatient but never quite losing his temper during a series of exasperating encounters. 

The first is on the beach where the Stranger (Olivia McGrath) is part Greek Chorus and part siren, questioning the Young Man about his intentions, not quite seductive, but not disinterested either, as he frets about just how much time he spends fretting. She returns as an intermittent, often unseen, observer.

His parents (Toby Blatt and Phoebe Woodbridge) introduce the dark humour that runs through the narrative, caricatures of fearful, clinging people, overdosed on the rhetoric of the Right with its antipathy towards the city, the metropolis imagined as a hellscape of death and destruction. His girlfriend (Yarrow Spillane) is their counterweight, offering her £10 win on a scratchy to fund a coach ticket out of Clacton. It’s a reversal of how those roles should play out in a young man’s life.

A graduate in an entry level job five years after he started, the Young Man stacks shelves with a flirtatious and already lonely work colleague (Amirah Alabere), both labouring under the martinet manager (Lewis Allen, channeling Stephen Lewis’s Inspector Blakey from On The Buses). But the would-be sociopath gets the fateful call from Head Office, so his car won’t last much longer. Olivia Israel rounds out the cast as an arcade worker who has blown into town and will blow out just as easily, roots just not taking in this flinty soil.

There’s another scene in which coach passengers cannot connect that felt like Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks reimagined for a Megabus, and a dreamscape all but establishes itself before the Young Man is brought down to earth in no uncertain terms, bloodied but unbowed.

If the production is a little over-extended at 90 minutes and the humour peppers the script rather than underpins it, these flaws are forgivable. Drifting captures on stage issues that are animating domestic politics (something that seems as stuck as the Young Man on progress towards a resolution) and (meta klaxon alert) casts actors from those forgotten places in which the story is set. It is, in a sense, its own morality play, satirising Ardent’s mission whilst also underlining its importance.

It’s not really like anything else in town at the moment for all the echoes alluded to above and you can throw Hamlet, Chekhov and Williams into that mix too. Squint and you can even see a cousin of Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem.

You can read more about Ardent in BroadwayWorld’s exclusive feature here.     

Drifting at Southwark Playhouse until 22 November