I Caught Crabs..., Broadwaybaby

I have been to Walberswick and I never caught crabs, but I'm glad I caught this new play by Fringe First Winner Joel Horwood.

Fitz and Wheeler are two teenage boys stuck in a backwater village in East Anglia, the sort of place where ‘nice people' live and from which teenagers long to escape. When not catching crabs (of the crustaceous variety) they hang about aimlessly on the seafront or enjoy the only remotely exciting thing on their limited horizon, spending a night clubbing and taking drugs in Lowestoft. Fitz is sexually immature and has the best line in the play - I won't give it away - whereas Wheeler thinks of himself as more worldly as he downloads porn on his father's computer. What throws a spanner into the delicate works of their fragile friendship is the arrival of Dani, a posh girl from a good school in London, on holiday in Walberswick with her mother. She is the catalyst, and on one hot night during exam leave, she and the two boys steal a car and from that moment on Fitz and Wheeler put crab-catching behind them for ever. The fault lines in the friendship between the two boys begin to show until the inevitable fracture when past secrets are revealed and jealousy rises like a green demon from the ocean.

Aaron Foy as Fitz and Barry Hepple as Wheeler are excellent as the two boys, Aaron Foy giving a supremely touching, amusing and sensitive performance in this, his stage debut. And Gemma Soul is good too as the young city siren who carries them onto the rocks. However, we have been in coming-of-age and road-trip territory before and sadly ‘I Caught Crabs' offers nothing beyond the usual horizons. It has a fine sense of place, and there is a well-acted and powerful moment when the two teenagers come to blows in the sea, but the play is neither explosive nor original. I longed for it to be more powerful, for it to say something new about growing up and about lost friendships, but like Walberswick itself the play seems to be rooted in niceness. Andrew Barron and Rosie Thompson cleverly play all the parents , yet I felt that the numerous scenes in which they appear just detracted from the main thrust of the story which was their sons' friendship. There was also, I thought, some unnecessary narration of the plot.

Still, ‘I Caught Crabs' is worth seeing for its sensitive depiction of teenage frustration and backwater life. And Foy and Hepple are two young actors to watch.

[David Scott]