So Here We Are (HighTide Festival)

Luke Norris came to attention with a piece about old-age pensioners starting an extra-marital relationship – an unusual topic for a 26 year-old writer. Three years on, he returns his focus to his peers, as infantile young men come to terms with an old friend’s death. It’s a stock small-town scenario, about limited horizons and lives lined with loss, but So Here We Are dares to suggest that there’s "genuine freedom, as well as cowardice, in being the first to check out.

The play starts in silence, the sort that no-one knows how to break. Four young men in black stare out to sea; a five-a-side team now one man down forever. By the state of their suits you shall know them; the scruffball, the straight-guy, the smart, sensitive success. Each sips at a Stella pensively, but, even now, their conversation is all standard-issue banter – anything to avoid acknowledging emotions – only their jokes all feel empty and old: nicknames that have sloshed around since school, gags gone stale with repetition. "Yeah, good one," sighs Pugh (Mark Weinman), unable to raise a hint of smile.

Frankie (Daniel Kendrick), their old schoolfriend, is dead: a car accident that may or may not have been deliberate. Norris starts with the aftermath, then takes us back to the day of his crash: Frankie’s birthday and a romantic dinner with Kirsty (Jade Anouka), the girlfriend he expects and is expected to marry. Her gift to him, a watch, only serves as a marker of ticking time and, as Frankie races round his old mates one by one, he sees his life stretching out inexorably before him. As Pugh explains, "You make your choices and you stick with them."

Everyone’s already in funeral gear, as if already weighed down by loss – specifically the freedoms of childhood. It’s very nearly an old trope – emotionally stunted young men stuck in childish ways – but Norris writes snappy, jaded playground banter, even if he overcooks the imagery of ice creams and I-Spy. That the men fixate on their bowel movements, discussing each dump as if it were a national treasure, is as much a mark of emotional constipation as of immaturity.

However, the play deftly taps into a provincial resistance to change. Roofer Pidge (newcomer Sam Melvin) clashes with a Latvian colleague he sees as a threat, while Pugh, a married police officer, hasn’t the imagination to do anything other than sink into family life. Mark Weinman’s understated performance suggests that this uncomplicated contentedness obtains its own authority, envied by peers where it ought to be pitied.

All of which makes calling Frankie’s implied relationship with banker Dan (Ciáran Owens) unnecessary. As well as providing too easy an explanation for Frankie’s death, it strays into cliché. It doesn’t need to: despite his success, Dan’s as stuck as anyone else, pinned into antisocial hours to trade on Hong Kong time.

Steven Atkinson‘s production captures the staidness of seaside life through crackling characterful performances, and Lily Arnold’s eloquent design finds metaphors in bolted-up shipping containers and tangled webs of fairground lights.

So Here We Are runs at the HighTide festival until 20th September, then transfers to the Manchester Royal Exchange until 10th October.