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Reader rating
Dir: Deborah Bruce.
Cast: Holly Atkins, Daniel Mays, Jack O'Connell, Rebecca Ryan
Description: Lauren and Daz have a dirty weekend away in a new drama by Fiona Evans, directed by Deborah Bruce.
Trains: Tube: Sloane Square 
Phone: 0207565 5000
Website: www.royalcourttheatre.com
Forbidden love: schoolgirl Beth (Rebecca Ryan) and her teacher Aiden (Daniel Mays)
This aggressively dull trek through the banalities of a dirty weekend in a Scarborough bed-and-breakfast, as lived by two sets of guilty lovers, prompts me to wonder what has happened to the nose of Dominic Cooke, the Royal Court's artistic director. Last November Cooke said you could "sniff the best plays after half a page". Judging by Fiona Evans's Scarborough, whose chief characteristic is its clammy air of contrivance, Cooke's nose has become blocked or else "best" has become a thing of the past at the Court.
It took me mere moments to turn up my own nose at Miss Evans's doomy romance drama, if only because it lacks a sense of narrative drive or purpose. The author is scheduled to begin writing for EastEnders and Casualty this year and her writing betrays the chirpy rat-tat-tat dialogue and glib fluency of soap opera writers.
By virtue of Deborah Bruce's tricksy, environmental production the Upstairs theatre has been transformed into a realistic bed-and-breakfast, complete with plastic flowers and flowering wallpaper. The audience is forced to sit on window-ledges, on the floor, or bits of furniture, as if we were entranced voyeurs of these bedroom proceedings.
For the first 40 minutes Jack O'Connell's 15-year-old Daz, a few hours away from reaching the age of sexual consent, romps around with his 29-year-old PT teacher, Holly Atkins's Lauren. Both actors much impress. Miss Atkins's plump, guilt-laden voluptuary comes up against O'Connell's angry, ambitious, sweetly smitten teenager whose world is bounded by sex, a teenage girl friend and taking photos on his mobile. There is nothing, apart from Atkins's wish to cause a stir, that explains why Lauren should briefly exchange her long-time, almost 50-year-old lover for a teenager.
In the second half, in the same hotel room, Rebecca Ryan's kittenishly provocative, teenage Beth and Daniel Mays's guilt-laden 29-year-old respectively speak the same dialogue assigned to Daz and Lauren. That this second pair convincingly express emotions and utter words assigned to someone of the opposite sex in the first half is of no particular significance.
Miss Evans may blur the difference between the genders, suggesting that when in love we all sound much the same. I doubt that, but I left Scarborough too bored to care.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
