Scarborough

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 way to doubt, heartache, and a promise that the teacher’s secret is safe: memory deleted.

The play rings truer and more poignant in the first half; the repeat version is just as brilliantly acted but more familiar, more sordid, more Humbert and Lolita. Older men taking advantage of young girls is a more common occurrence than the desperate, unorthodox situation Lauren has encouraged. And Beth is far more knowing and manipulative than Daz, who is, perhaps, an unlikely, gawky, pimply object of the teacher’s affections.

None of this detracts from the pleasure of watching Deborah Bruce’s production, which is like watching the one dance piece with different choreography. The audience is herded into the upstairs studio, transformed by designer Jo Newberry into one of those seaside bedrooms where time has stood still and style has been strangled: rose-patterned wallpaper, cheap carpet and furnishings, plates on the wall (including one of Charles and Di).

The audience perches on windowsills, or the odd chair, or the cabinet, or the sideboard, or on the raised area by the window, where sunlight streams through net curtains. The environmental setting makes eavesdropping voyeurs of us all, even when a character retires to the offstage bathroom, still visible through the glass door.

There’s not one kink or false note in the writing, which is energised by such incidents as the giving of a present, the surprise news that the headmaster is prowling the promenade, or an exchange about clouds, what’s inside them? The naturalistic acting is of a calibre unmatched in London, with the tall and gangly Mays adding a wild and scary drunken incursion for good measure in the second part. The unaccredited soundtrack is superb, too.

– Michael Coveney