Cockpit Theatre 5 & 6 December. Reviewed by Claire Roderick
The 2007 Fringe First Award-winning Scarborough is unfortunately very much like the relationships it portrays – shallow and unmemorable.
Lauren and Daz are spending Daz’s birthday weekend on a romantic break in Scarborough. It’s Daz’s 16th birthday, Lauren is his (almost) 30 year old PE teacher. It is unclear who is the teenager and who is the adult at first, until Lauren tries to end the relationship and Daz becomes more childlike as he struggles to cope.
The second act is a word for word replay of the first, with the genders swapped. Aiden is the PE teacher in a relationship with pupil Beth. This idea has great potential, but the writing is just not good enough to sustain the audience’s interest for a second time. Presenting the play in the round only serves to emphasise this – the underwhelmed faces of some audience members were a little distracting.
Fiona Evans has written the play from a neutral viewpoint. The adults are not portrayed as predatory, but any person who justifies beginning a relationship with a child with the words “you made the first move” should be forced to wear the Childcatcher’s outfit in public. Evans obviously doesn’t want to colour the audiences opinions about the characters, but this neutrality results in bland, one dimensional, forgettable characters with clichéd motivations. The adults were in underage relationships with teachers themselves, and are insipid and needy, lacking the emotional intelligence and maturity to ever attract people their own age, while the children are from unhappy homes with a drunken, philandering father, and are looking for love and stability in all the wrong places. It reads like some cheesy American TV movie.
With bolder writing and characterisation this play could have something important to say – as it is, it is sadly lacking. With all the recent scandal about certain judges giving lenient sentences to female teachers and carers, the issue of the abuser’s gender could have been explored with much more finesse, but Scarborough adds nothing to the debate.
Ava Pickett and Charlie Tantam do their best with the script and the limited characters, and are equally convincing as teenagers and adults, delivering some very sweet moments – usually in dialogue free sections. Let’s just say that the most memorable line of the play is actually a quote from “Mystic Pizza”.
There are a few nice touches to highlight the gender differences. Daz give his teacher a topless photo of himself, while Beth’s teacher receives a photo of her in school uniform. As the adults disengage from the children Lauren is constantly moving towards Daz to comfort him, while Aiden does his best to keep the bed between him and Beth at all times, never touching her. But still – nothing profound or worthwhile comes from sitting through the second act.
Paraphrasing one of my old school reports – Scarborough had great potential, but ultimately turned into a no-hoper.
Now that’s how a proper teacher communicates with teenagers!