Review: HERONS, Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, January 25 2016

There's no sugar-coating teenage bullying and, sure enough, there's no sugar-coating at all in Herons, Simon Stephens' brutal play first performed at The Royal Court in 2001 and revived at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith (until 13 February). The herons of the title are the birds that swoop down on the fish that swim in the River Lea, the London waterway that runs through the East End. The title also refers to the gang of three schoolkids who swoop down on Billy, as trapped as the fish in his watery home by a feckless father and absent, troubled mother.

These bullies would pick on a loner like Billy anyway, but their leader, Scott, has extra motivation to persecute Billy, as it was Billy's father's evidence that sent his elder brother Ross to prison for the manslaughter of a young girl by the same riverside some 12 months earlier. Cue a Lord of the Flies-style breakdown of social order, as the teens' underdeveloped superegos fail to rein in atavistic urges to wreak revenge or simply to dominate something in an environment over which they have little or no personal control.

Despite an overly tricksy staging by director Sean Holmes and designer Hyemi Shin, with the actors forced to don rather prissy school uniforms to splash through ankle-deep water in front of projections of primates preening and fighting (we get it...), the young cast are so good that we can concentrate on the appalling matters at hand.

Max Gill plays Billy as a bright, sensitive boy (with more than a passing resemblance to Grange Hill's much put-upon Roland Browning) and he holds the moral centre of the play with great skill for an actor still at stage school. He gets strong support from an ensemble cast in which the standouts are Sophia Decaro as Adele, a girl slowly realising the power of empathy and Billy Matthews as Scott, Billy's damaged nemesis, whose fate is left open to interpretation (though I'm pretty sure what happened).

Amongst the sixth formers well represented in the audience, there were sharp intakes of breath initially at the swearing - there's nothing off limits in these characters' vocabularies - and then at Scott's chosen mode of violence (not as explicitly presented as it might have been, for which many of us were grateful). Walking out, the word I heard most spoken was "intense" and, at 70 minutes all-through, that's certainly the case.

Does it all work? Well, the casting and performances are so good that the production's fussiness is overcome and then some. In the tradition not just of the aforementioned Lord of the Flies, but also Kes, this slice of life amongst the kids from the estates that are being abandoned as the government withdraws the Welfare State's safety net. acts as a warning to those who skim over the relentless news of cuts to social services the quicker to get to a Kardashian's latest love tryst. So its message is as relevant in 2016 as it was in 2001 and, I suspect, as it will be in 2031.

Photo Tristram Kenton

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