Theatre review: The Breach

In the mid 1970s in Louisville, Kentucky, a construction worker fell off scaffolding and died. Faulty equipment was to blame, but the company managed to get away with paying the family the bare minimum compensation, so by the time we meet his teenage children in 1977, they're struggling to keep their heads above water, and the younger child is being badly bullied at school. Acton (Stanley Morgan) might be small, asthmatic and awkward, making for an easy target, but he's also very smart, so soon he finds a pair of protectors: Two older boys will keep him safe if he helps them prepare for their exams. Naomi Wallace's The Breach takes place entirely in the basement of his small house, which the well-off Hoke (Alfie Jones) and his sidekick Frayne (Charlie Beck) think would make a great clubhouse for the trio. But first they need permission from Acton's older sister Jude (Shannon Tarbet.)

The pair are infatuated with, and intimidated by, the confident and serious Jude, who manages to get a weekly fee out of the rich kids for the use of the basement. The three boys' friendship does seem to be genuine, and Jude occasionally makes for a reluctant fourth in their exploits.

But inevitably the real dynamic between the four is much more complicated, and their relationship is leading to some incredibly dark places. The action jumps backwards and forwards 14 years, and in 1991 Hoke, now played by Tom Lewis, and Frayne (Douggie McMeekin) return to the basement to clear out the house after Acton's suicide. Just how badly the relationships have soured can be seen by the fact that, in 1977, his older sister would do anything to stop the family from breaking up, but by 1991 Jude (Jasmine Blackborrow) had cut ties so completely that the others didn't even manage to trace her until after the funeral.

The catalyst is a weird power play in the form of Top Your Love, a game Hoke introduces that requires the boys to make increasingly major sacrifices to prove how much their "brotherhood" means to them. The game quickly gets out of hand, going to dark and grotesque places, and culminating in a shocking event at Jude's 17th birthday party. But even that, as we bounce back and forth between the '70s and '90s, turns out not to have transpired in quite the way anyone remembers it.

It's probably fair to call The Breach a mixed play; on the one hand I enjoyed it more than I was expecting to (I think there's just something uninspiring about the publicity photos - Naomi Dawson's minimalist set works well enough for the play but looks dingy in stills) and there's a lot of plot twists and turns to follow. Although pretty bleak, it did get some grim laughs, often at the lengths Hoke will go to to justify his behaviour to himself. With a lot of recent theatre dealing with toxic masculinity or financial inequality, I found it interesting the way the playwright intertwines the two here: Hoke's sense of male privilege is hugely informed by his financial privilege. And while Wallace is herself from Kentucky, she's lived in the UK for 20 years, and I like to think that's influenced her decision to make a private medical insurer the play's big bad corporation.

On the other hand, far too much about the characters, their actions and their psychology doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. Wallace describes the play as not being strictly naturalistic, uses dialogue that sometimes drifts into the poetic, and says she originally tried to structure it as a series of sonnets; so perhaps the problem is the disconnect between this, and Sarah Frankcom's solid, down-to-earth production, that brings the flights of fancy crashing to earth. Nowhere more literally than in the play's other twisted kids' game, The Falling Game, in which the siblings roll around the floor reenacting their father's grisly death, imagining the last thoughts that went through his mind. I do, sort of, buy that this might be some people's odd sort of coping strategy, but as it doesn't really achieve the kind of dreamlike sense that seems to be implied, it does feel like the fact that it's a deeply unhealthy one should be investigated.

And while I don't begrudge a relatively well-off venue giving work to lots of young actors, it's quite odd to have the roles split when we're used to seeing a single actor play a character over much longer periods of their life than 14 years (there are moments when the older versions observe their younger selves, but they're not essential to the play.) The fact that teenagers are generally played by actors in their twenties anyway means it's weird to have them recast when they reach thirty. Tarbet has been a stage regular for at least a decade so it's particularly odd to have her replaced when her character reaches... her actual age. So a few too many things, both practical and in the text itself, don't quite add up, and distract from what the play is trying to say; but there are interesting ideas in there, and a sort of dark, slow-burn thriller way of saying them.

The Breach by Naomi Wallace is booking until the 4th of June at Hampstead Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.