Theatre reviews: Kev Campbell Was He | Driftwood

These two plays explore the tensions that exist between those who choose to leave Britain’s working class communities and those who stay, writes Joyce McMillan

Kev Campbell Was He, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★

Driftwood, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★

It was bad luck for new Play, Pie And Pint boss Brian Logan to lose the second play in his eagerly awaited spring season, when Every Brilliant Thing star Jonny Donahoe - scheduled to present his new show, Hell - had to drop out at short notice.

Yet for an inspired theatre producer, every disaster contains an opportunity; and Logan has seized the chance, in Donahoe’s absence, to give new life to one of the small-scale gems of last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, in Glasgow-based writer-performer Alexander Tait’s award-winning debut play Kev Campbell Was He.

Set in and near a series of toilets around Glasgow, Kev Campbell Was He is a brilliantly vivid monologue about a young working-class guy, working a dead end job in a cafe, whose life takes an unexpected turn when his favourite pen - which he has been using to write “Kev Campbell was here” on a toilet door - rolls away mid-phrase into the neighbouring cubicle.

Alexander Tait in Kev Campbell Was He | Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

The guy in the next cubicle is Glasgow University student Quinn, posh, gay, and different from Kev in almost every way. Yet the two strike up an unlikely friendship; and in no time, Quinn has Kev - who possesses a wild storytelling imagination - applying for a creative writing course at the university, with all that that means in terms of growing distance from his old mates, their aspirations that go no further than a well-paid job on a building site, and their casual homophobia, deeply ingrained in their culture and language.

It’s this homophobia, in the end, that drives the story to its crisis, in an ugly incident which forces Kev to face up to his own complicity, as an apparently helpless bystander. In this beautifully-crafted piece of writing and performance, though - directed with flair by Ivan Hamshaw-Thomas - it becomes clear that however painful Kev’s new creative journey may sometimes be, there is no going back; and that the self-loathing and self-questioning he experiences, at the play’s end, is becoming the stuff of new stories, even as we watch.

Driftwood | Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

The same tension in 21st century Britain between those who escape from battered working class communities, and those who stay, also shapes Tim Foley’s 2023 two-hander Driftwood, a typically powerful piece of text-based yet intensely physical theatre from Neil Bettles’s Wigan-based ThickSkin company - which co-created the Traverse’s brilliant How Not To Drown, in 2019 - and Shropshire’s new play company Pentabus.

Now on a UK tour, Driftwood is set in a dying seaside resort near the mouth of the River Tees; and it begins with the familiar scenario of two brothers brought together by their father’s death, after years of relative estrangement. Mark has escaped to the city, where he lives the life of a liberated young gay professional; his younger brother Tiny has stayed behind, and worked as their father’s carer during his long terminal illness.

There are predictable tensions and resentments between them, as Mark fails to visit the old man on his deathbed, and Tiny, in turn, boycotts the funeral Mark has organised an paid for. Instead, Tiny waits brooding on the beach where the whole action of the play takes place; hoping for a sign that his father’s death is real and final, while all around him the signs of environmental breakdown mount, caused - Mark thinks - by the recent dredging of the chemical-filled post-industrial sea-bed to create the new Tees Freeport.

If the scenario is familiar, in other words, the imagery and writing surrounding it is both brilliantly specific, and chillingly resonant. And it’s captured both in powerful performances by James Westphal and Jerome Yates, and in stunning choreography and video, lighting and sound design; as the brothers wrestle with each other, and finally with the sea itself, in a tense and terrifying journey towards some kind of resolution.

Kev Campbell Was He is at Oran Mor, Glasgow until 8 March, the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 11-15 March, and the Gaiety Theatre, Ayr, 20-22 March. Driftwood, run ended.