I Caught Crabs in Walberswick

Curious times at the Bush. After all the fuss over nearly losing the Arts Council grant, the place has subsided into virtual silence, with a series of technical problems, a makeshift programme and most recently a flood. One begins to wonder if they went badly over budget at some point…

Meanwhile, this slightly old-fashioned little local play from Eastern Angles touring set-up and the High Tide Festival in Suffolk (via this year’s Edinburgh fringe, where it won a “First”) is an unconvincing filler. In its picture of two local Walberswick lads going on a booze-fuelled spree to Lowestoft with a posh pneumatic temptress, it resembles a low rent version of Jules et Jim in the irritating style of John Burrows and John Harding’s “growing up” mini-epic, The Golden Pathway Annual.

Playwright Joel Horwood, who made a bit of a splash with his fringe musical Mikey the Pikey a few years back, is not without talent or promise. But the minute you have all-purpose narrator characters called One and Two nudge-nudging the audience, you’re lost. Admittedly these actors, Andrew Barron and Rosie Thomson, also quick-change as selfish and “where did we go wrong” parents, but Lucy Kerbel’s 80-minute production never recovers from an establishing tone of tweeness.

Fitz and Wheeler – energetically played by Aaron Foy and Harry Hepple – are diverted on the eve of a biology GCSE exam by the vision of Dani (Gemma Soul) on the beach. It’s high, hot summer. She asks them to apply her sun-tan lotion. They make a date, go clubbing, steal a car, run over a fox, brush with the law. But you know nothing really bad is going to happen, even though you hope against hope it does.

Behind the play, acted out against designer Takis’s photographic blow-ups with a neat set of silver crates for props and furnishings, is the cultural conflict between genuine locals and weekending Londoners – ironically, the High Tide Festival is the initiative of just such a bunch of metropolitan interlopers – but the argument is feebly expressed; except in one striking scene when the lads find Dani grooving alone at the “party” she’s invented at her estranged father’s empty house in Blakeney along the Norfolk coast.

-Michael Coveney