The Daily Telegraph - Features
Straight-As to suicide: an adolescent horror story
The first part of a trilogy set in blue-collar America, The Breach, a new play by Yorkshire-based, Kentucky-born Naomi Wallace, flashes back and forth through the lives of four teenagers – Jude, her brother Acton, and their two male friends, Frayne and Hoke – jumping between 1977 and the older versions of themselves in 1991. The story, revealed in bits and pieces through that temporal dance, charts how the repercussions of past secrets and lies both mould and connect these characters in the present.
In 1977, and just before her 17th birthday, Jude is a sparky young woman who’s holding down multiple jobs to keep her family afloat in the aftermath of her father’s neglectful death on a construction site and her mother’s subsequent depression. Her brother, Acton, a straight-A student and victim of bullying at school, befriends Frayne and Hoke, who agree to protect him in exchange for help with their schoolwork. These new friends form a club headquartered in the siblings’ basement, where Frayne and Hoke become the rabbits caught in the headlights of Jude’s seeming sexual maturity.
Wallace has said that The Breach, which is premiering at Hampstead Theatre ahead of a UK tour, is closer to her youth than any of her 18 plays to date, and her text brilliantly captures the intensity and wrong-headed wildness of adolescence. Hoke, who freely admits to sexually molesting his sleeping aunt, initiates a pact among the three boys to seal their bond of friendship and exercise their social power by intentionally failing his SAT exams. Each boy must follow suit by renouncing something precious. Acton has nothing of value to sacrifice, and somehow ends up pledging his sister.
When Jude finds out that they are planning to slip her a date-rape drug, which Hoke, son of a pharmaceuticals executive, can easily obtain, she decides to protect Acton by willingly ingesting the pill, unbeknown to Frayne and Hoke, who will take turns raping her. It’s 15 minutes that will drive a wedge into Jude and Acton’s relationship and 15 years later, lead to a showdown between Jude, Frayne and Hoke in the wake of Acton’s suicide.
The question of consent at the heart of the play is complicated by how its protagonist (played by Shannon Tarbet in the 1977 scenes and Jasmine Blackborow in 1991) has compromised her burgeoning sexuality to protect her family.
“I had to save what was left of my family. Isn’t that what you do when you’re a good girl?”
Her transactional sacrifice is all the more disturbing because it proves to be in vain.
All of this might sound like a bleak night at the theatre, but it’s leavened by plenty of humour in Wallace’s excellent text. The Breach also sharply indicts Big Pharma, whose heartless face is perfectly captured by Tom Lewis as Hoke, in denial of the role that his family business – peddling anti-depressants and date-rape drugs – plays in the lives of ordinary Americans. And when there’s movement on designer Naomi Dawson’s minimalist raked concrete slab of a set, such as Jude dancing to Eric Clapton’s Layla or the siblings re-enacting their father’s tumble to death as a macabre coping mechanism, it has visceral meaning and punch.
Unfortunately, this renders perplexing the decision by director Sarah Francom to make the characters interact, for the most part, in static poses. Her intention may have been for the audience to focus on the dialogue, which is genuinely riveting, but it’s a distractingly odd choice for such a complex story about the hubris of youth. Never mind: for all its flaws, The Breach is an absorbing story of love, lust and loyalty.
Until June 4. Tickets: 020 7722 9301; hampsteadtheatre.com