Scarborough

Synopsis

Step into to a faded hotel room where Lauren and Daz are having an illicit weekend away. Amongst the peeling wallpaper, they laugh, quarrel and make love, but they don't dare go out. After all, at just 15 years old, one of them is just a child... the other their teacher. A dangerously charged romance is played out amidst bitter-sweet love songs in this award-winning play.

Our Review:

12 February 2008

Fiona Evans’ expanded import from last year’s Edinburgh Festival fringe (a Northern Firebrand production first seen in Newcastle in October 2006) goes behind the headlines of teachers seducing pupils and those court reports where you can never really glean the truth. How can you believe who made the first move? Does love never come into it?

Scarborough is a deeply humane and very touching response to the wider diagnosis stated in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys: that eroticism is part and parcel of the teacher/pupil relationship, and always has been. In Part One, 15-year-old Daz (Jack O'Connell) and his 29-year-old PE teacher Lauren (Holly Atkins) prepare to hit the high spots.

In the new added Part Two, with virtually the identical text, in the same dismal Scarborough B&B, 15-year-old Beth (Rebecca Ryan) and her PE teacher Aiden (Daniel Mays) do likewise. The “dirty weekend” euphoria on the brink of the student’s 16th birthday gives...

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Latest User Review

rds - 19 February 2008:

Yes, well one could start criticising this or that aspect of the piece, but you know what - sucks to that! It's quite simply an amazing piece of theatre. Five stars must also go to the scenary designer and makers for recreating such a realistic seedy hotel room in Scarborough - hence the title, and to the lighting designer for flooding it so effectively with daylight. Considering the audience are in the room itself this was a big challenge to pull off. The actors are a revelation. This play is all about realism from the staging, the acting and the dialogue so that even if at times some of it comes across as banal, which we know it would in reality, it doesn't seem to matter. It is infact two plays. The first involves a young male pupil and his female sports teacher, the second a young female pupil and her male sports teacher. I am still not quite sure what the message is apart from emphasisng the gulf between generations which dissappears once sex is involved? The characters talk of "loving" each other, but is it love they are really talking about or lust instead? Each of the adults lost out on their own adolescence by another obsession and seem to be trying, tragically, to recapture that lost youth - well maybe? But even with this seemingly dodgy premise the skill of the actors pulls it off and reveals, touchingly, how adults and children can at times be caught up in the malestrom of passion which neither understand nor are able to control. A brilliant effort from Fiona Evans and a worthy addition to the RC's showcase for new writing....

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