BWW Reviews: MOTH & PASTORAL, Hightide Festival, Halesworth, May 4 2013

Unlikely as it seems, the small town of Halesworth, nestling in the badlands between Ipswich and Norwich, is hosting its seventh annual Hightide Festival. As Spring bursts through in the fields that unfold all around you as you approach this Eastern outpost, so too do young playwrights in the town's superbly appointed spaces, benefiting from the Festival's development work and its May showcase. Having seen two excellent productions last year, both of which went to London (Mudlarks and The Agony and Ecstacy of Steve Jobs), I returned for a couple more this year. Here's what I thought.

Moth is a slice of teenage angst, with echoes of Columbine (now all of 14 years ago) and the more recent outrage in Boston. In a black box set, Stacey Gregg and Jordan Mifsud play Clarissa and Sebastian, fifteen year-old misfits, bruised and bullied, occasionally lashing out at each other, occasionally clinging on to each other - there's nobody else for them. The actors also assume the roles of their tormentors, assisted by Jack Knowles' aggressive lighting and George Dennis' impressive sound design, enhancing the claustrophobia of the tight square stage.

The intensity of feeling trapped, alone and misunderstood runs through the full 70 minutes, as the cruelties of adolescence crowd and confuse the two outsiders. In seeking escape, Sebastian - sharing the name of the martyred saint and a moth, captured in a jar and banging its head as it pursues what little light it can see - creates an apocalyptic fantasy. At least that's what it seems, until Clarissa realises that there may be more to it than a kid with issues.

In Pastoral, Thomas Eccleshare recreates the early nineteenth century's rapid, rapacious, relentless urbanisation in the twenty-first century - only this time, the process is reversed. Instead of looking out of her window at the well-fed products of a consumer society built on maximising the use of natural resources (and then casting them aside), Moll sees weeds, trees and animals invade her council estate at an unseemly pace - transforming the concrete jungle into a real jungle and trapping her and her companions in their flat. She, and her companions, sit and wonder what to do, with a tree coming through the window, weeds sprouting through the floorboards and a bear growling in the corridors.

As many dystopias do, Eccleshare's world owes something to The Lord of the Flies, but he favours black comedy over tragedy and a message of love's endurance in the face of hate's ugly interventions. He is supported by a fine cast in which Anna Calder-Marshall as Moll is funny and observant as the conscience of the survivors, and Polly Frame revels in the freedoms an eleven-year-old boy would discover in the world suddenly turned on its head. Not all the other characters are as fully developed as the two principals, and there might be an even better play to emerge if they were. As it has to be, this dystopia is certainly believable. Right now, in the heart of urban London, I can see a fox searching for food in the street - a sight unseen twenty years ago. What if more - many more - came?

The Hightide Festival continues until 12 May.

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