Reviews

Review: Hyem (Theatre 503)

Philip Correia’s debut play runs at Theatre503 until 23 September

What do you call a knock-off Jerusalem? I can’t believe it’s not Butterworth.

It might be a tad unfair to hold Philip Correia’s debut play up to the best of the last decade, but Hyem all but invites direct comparison. In Mick Dobson – "the Pied Piper of Fountain Park" – it has its very own ‘Rooster’ Byron: a charismatic misfit who surrounds himself with teenage kids and lets them run wild. Alongside his sherry-dry partner Sylv, Mick opens the front door of his Newcastle home to the local waifs and strays – kids from broken homes with nowhere else to go – and takes them under his wing.

Mick's sitting room becomes a clubhouse of sorts; at once a sanctuary and a house of sin. It’s a space for underage drinking, teenage fumbles and lessons in Marxist theory; a place where, for better or worse, adolescents are treated like adults. It’s all innocent enough – or is it? The beauty of Correia’s script is that it’s never quite clear, but nor is it ever quite comfortable. Mick might be a loveable Peter Pan figure. But he might be something altogether more predatory.

His latest lure is Dummy – Alan Dummet (Ryan Nolan) – a quiet, gormless 13 year-old with an unfriendly, possibly violent, stepfather. Having followed his playground crush Laura (Aimee Kelly) back to Mick’s one afternoon, he finds himself plied with teenage treats: a breadcrumb trail of fags, porn and alcopops. If it’s hard to shake the sense he’s being groomed somehow, it's just as hard to ignore the genuine care Mick and Sylv show him. It's coincidence that he's the spit of Mick's son Mike, who long since left home.

Dummy’s definitely not the first lost soul to land in their lap. Another girl, Shelley, has practically moved in, one suspects out of necessity, while Dean, older and tougher with a tear tattooed onto his face, has a bedroom upstairs. Party games show signs of all those that have been before, but the bricks that come through the window, the chatter at the local pub, suggest that this isn’t exactly Byker Grove either.

The walls of his flat – in Jasmine Swan’s design – tell a story of their own. With its purple walls and yellow door, it’s a grotto of assorted junk: model ships, framed photos and old Chinese lanterns; stuffed animals and trophy knives. A six-foot python – Vivien Leigh – lies coiled in a cage. A gold-spray-painted dildo serves as a table decoration. It’s beautifully confused and confusing. Sex is mixed with humour; danger with charm. There’s an aura of worldliness, but it feels cheap and false. Those animals – porcelain dogs and rabbits in reading glasses – are both cutesy and eerie; a Disney fantasia that might bear its fangs.

Set at the start of Tony Blair’s second term – the Iraq War is just rumbling into life – Hyem nudges against the politics of its era. The petty lawlessness of Mick’s place defies the strictures of the nanny state, and his approach – kindly or otherwise – pushes against a culture that keeps kids and adults completely separate. His radical politics, which almost seem forced into hiding, suggests the rising tide of a neoliberal consensus, and the rumours around him imply a culture uneasy with non-conformists.

Though Correia sometimes strains for drama and slips into contrivance, Jonny Kelly's production keeps the ambiguity up, laced with equal measures of sweetness and danger, and Patrick Driver makes Mick inscrutable: boisterous, bolshie and wayward. Charlie Hardwick's Sylv, sharp and tender, seems the only person who sees him as he is. Hyem's no Jerusalem – what is? – but it's a promising debut nonetheless.

Hyem runs at Theatre503 until 23 September.