Review: STILL HERE, Jack Studio Theatre

Rhys and Mari are navigating that tricky summer hiatus between taking A-levels and getting the results, a month or two of uncertainty, of hopes and of fears. A time when, as the expression has it, shit gets real. They're both dealing with past issues that have lain unresolved for too long but are now bubbling ever closer to the surface.

Rhys's mother is approaching her 50th birthday, but is a resident in a care home, the youngest there. Rhys's father won't talk about it and Rhys can't talk about it - you can all but feel the lava boiling in his emotional volcano.

Yasmin has been excluded from her private school and is living with her grandmother, who had fled Uganda after Idi Amin's racist expulsion of the country's Asians in the 70s. She is estranged from her parents, to whom she knows she will have to return at some point and isn't quite sure who she really is, juggling multiple ethnicities, cultures and even languages.

They're kids from very different social backgrounds, but both carry psychological scars and both need to let out their anxieties before they curdle into full-blown neuroses. Boxing is their chosen means to exorcise their tensions, but Rhys is wary of letting women into his sacred space at the gym and Yasmin is hardly one to take no for an answer. Sparks fly. There's a mutual attraction too, but neither has, at least not yet, the emotional intelligence to articulate it, 18 going on 12 in that regard, some arrested development very much evident.

Mari Lloyd's new play covers a lot of ground and director, Julia Stubbs, draws splendid performances from Phillip John Jones and Emma Kaler as the two troubled teens. That said, the narrative structure (a two-hander in which separate monologues overlap as the protagonists' linked stories are recounted) limits the opportunities for the pair to connect. I was hoping for a conversation, a tender moment or even a fight, but, in keeping with the theme of isolation, such contact was all but limited to zero.

So, an all-through 75 minutes or so that refused an opportunity or two for dramatic development, but did fully meet one of my criteria for a successful play. On the bus home, I found myself very keen to find out what happened next to the two kids we'd grown to respect a lot and even love a little.

Still Here is at the Jack Studio Theatre until 25 March

Photo courtesy of Jack Studio Theatre

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