Songlines – High Tide Festival, Walthamstow

Joe Hurst and Fanta Barrie in Songlines at the High Tide Festival, Walthamstow. Picture: Helen Maybanks

Songlines continues at the High Tide Festival, Walthamstow until 30 September 2018.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Coming of age tales are almost as common as coming of age itself. Yet there’s still the impulse to revisit that emotionally raw and turbulent time. Some of the fire is lost as we settle into adulthood but the story of finding ourselves and relating to others still raises the embers in us.

Songlines is a short (one hour) trip into the trauma of adolescence and the emotionally sticky devirginifying process.

Written by the talented Tallulah Brown – who has been courted by the likes of Soho Theatre, Channel 4 and the BBC Writers’ Programme – the play centres around young hot wire Stevie (Fanta Barrie) transplanted to rural Suffolk from gritty city life.

She makes friends with local loser Stan (Joe Hurst) who is more at ease with himself. Everything is funny, gauche, awkward but relations are brittle under the strain of defensiveness and self-consciousness. There is some beautiful, believable acting here, and a forgivable tad of over-acting as well.

The band Trills provide beautiful melancholic songs that float about the theatre evoking the Suffolk byways. Generally, this is really evocative but it could also distract from the overall dramatic flow of the piece – for example, the lights go up – maybe six times – when they start playing. The author Brown is part of Trills, guitar, as is Seraphina D’Arby – rather sadly the third person is not listed in the programme.

All are brilliant, and there is a folky vibe that connects to the folklore themes in the play, but the sparkly trio is centrestage and in the audience’s eyeline right behind the actors. This is quite distracting, and although Brown is often seen smiling her actors on, the other two are stony-faced throughout – this is a flaw of direction and easily remedied.

On this occasion it felt like nerves garbled some of the dialogue and monologue, but the delivery never stopped the humour. There is a lot of good, funny quips that the audience loves and Hurst’s comic timing is brilliant. It often has the feel of a piece that had been started as improv (which gives it a positive energy) but has yet to develop into a finished piece.

When all is said and done, this is an hour of magic (directed by George Chilcott) that you would certainly tell your mates to go and see. It’s witty, sharp, poignant and often laugh-out-loud funny. Tallulah Brown delivers but promises more in the future.

Kieran Falconer