Driftwood

Photo credit: Andrew Billington

Review by Russell Cook from Suffolk Village Info.

This is a wonderfully, absorbing and dramatic play with a serious subject injected with pathos and humour throughout.

The brotherly partnership of Tiny and Mark, played respectively by Jerome Yates and James Westphal, is thoroughly absorbing throughout the 80 minute performance, bouncing off each other in dramatic fashion.

It’s all performed to a backdrop of the isolated and often windswept beach of Seaton Carew, in the North East of England.

The brothers need to figure out what to do with their father – but the sea has other ideas. Their dad is dying, and their town is crumbling. Family rifts and political divides try to pull them apart, while a figure made of driftwood stalks the shore at night.

Tiny has never left their faded home town in Hartlepool and has been caring 24/7 for his sick father, while Mark - the older, estranged, gay brother - has stayed away in Manchester with his partner, never coming to visit his brother and father. That causes friction, and often humour, between the pair, not least when Tiny suggests creating a funeral pyre for his father on the beach utilising flotsam and jetsam from the sea. Much to Tiny’s displeasure, Mark takes charge of the funeral arrangements but Tiny fails to show up to the service.

We see them coming together on the sands of Seaton Carew, to the cries of gulls and surge of water around them.

Photo credit: Andrew Billington

Tiny feels an elemental connection to the sea and land, believing in its local mythologies, while Mark only sees its merciless qualities.

The play captures the brothers’ relationship with tenderness without ever slipping into sentimentality, and also conjures their backdrop in the post-industrial decline of the North East. There are lovely switches between humour and solemnity, as well as sadness and scratchiness between the brothers.

You have Tiny’s grieving vulnerability, contrasted by Mark’s buttoned-up resentments at his father’s homophobic bullying, and it’s all beautifully done through their exchanges on the beach.

There’s a giant screen at the back of the stage, showing a mix of abstract water imagery, landscape shots and dialect which creates an atmosphere and watery dread. Meanwhile, lurking out at sea is a mythical sunken ship along with the mysterious watery creature which haunts the pair.

Written by Tom Foley and co-directed by Neil Bettles and Elle While, ‘Driftwood’ is a moving exploration of brotherhood, grief, mourning, love, reminiscing and so much more.

Another great night at the New Wolsey!

Driftwood is at New Wolsey Theatre until March 15.

FOR FULL SHOW DETAILS AND BOOKING LINK, CLICK HERE