Two teenagers meet on a bombed-out sofa in the middle of nowhere. One is a young drug runner, wet behind the ears; the other is an addict’s daughter who brandishes a knife and acts tough but is lonely, desperate and so hungry she lives on cat food.
Drugs connect Ben (William Robinson) and Daize (Rachelle Diedericks) on opposite sides of the county lines: Daize’s mother is disastrously in the grip of the drugs that Ben’s boss is peddling. There is quick, sharp dialogue between them, full of barbs and cusses at the start, with a trembling undercurrent. But out of this antipathy emerges a delicate, wretched love story that builds its tenderness and tragedy to create an almost epic quality.
Playwright Tom Powell won the 2021 Papatango prize for the play, staged at Vault festival this year and also adapted into this hour-long film version from Pentabus and Rural Media.
Co-directed by Rachel Lambert and Elle While, it takes us from the couple’s first encounter to scenes that jump ahead days and weeks. The pair, as they slowly connect, look like children, destitutes and Beckett’s wretched vagabonds all at once, bound together by need and powerlessness but also love. They only ever meet outside, in rural Kent, with piercingly clear, innocent birdsong part of Justin Dolby’s atmospheric sound design.
The impoverishments of Daize’s life are revealed slowly: she is in a state of trauma, sleeping on the sofa with cigarette butts and empty cat food tins around her. Ben is caught in his own trap, unable to leave the drug running, and living in fear of violence from his boss.
Diedericks and Robinson give subtle performances and have a chemistry that builds in intensity – their romance feels real but devoid of sentimentality. They are innocents dragged into the damaged adult world and their relationship evokes Romeo and Juliet although the final scene leaves them with a glimmer of hope.
