Driftwood review – quietly affecting tale of brotherly love and loss
Two grieving brothers come together on a beach to thrash out their differing memories of a father who lies dying at home. Mark (James Westphal) is the older, estranged, gay brother who has made a successful life elsewhere while Tiny (Jerome Yates) has never left their faded home town in Hartlepool.
We only ever see them coming together on the sands of Seaton Carew, to the cries of gulls and surge of water around them. Tiny feels an elemental connection to this sea and land, believing in its local mythologies, while Mark only sees its merciless qualities.
There are lovely switches between humour and solemnity, as well as sadness and scratchiness between brothers: Tiny’s grieving vulnerability contrasted by Mark’s buttoned-up resentments at his father’s homophobic bullying. There are contested memories with gentle shocks and apologies. It is beautifully done through their exchanges on the beach.
Writer Tim Foley has won several awards for past works (including the Bruntwood prize) and it is clear, from the love and lyricism in this script, that he is a striking talent. The play captures the brothers’ relationship with tenderness without ever slipping into sentimentality, and also conjures their backdrop in the post-industrial decline of the north-east.
Co-produced by Pentabus and ThickSkin, what eclipses the delicacy of the script is the giant screen at the back of the stage, showing a mix of abstract water imagery and landscape shots, which at first seems like a good device for creating atmosphere and watery dread. But this cinematic element swamps the theatricality and feels too literal and overbearing, the evocative sound design by Lee Affen might just as well have sufficed.
Co-directed by Elle While and Neil Bettles, there are two wooden beach structures moved around on the stage and in-between scenes but this physicality does not seem clean or distinct enough, the brothers’ movement a little woolly.
An environmental message is tied to the prevailing theme of loss, with dead crabs strewn on the beach and polluted water, and a slightly strained analogy between the lies of the father, and that of the government.
But the emotional core is full of truth, sadness and beauty, and it is this that brings the quiet magic of this drama.
