THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Samuel D. Hunter
Trafalgar Theatre, 14 Whitehall, London SW1A 2DY until November 22, 2025
Samuel D. Hunter who wrote The Whale, which won an Oscar for Brendan Fraser, is a celebrated American playwright known for a number of sensitive portrayals of rural small-town life, in productions staged with a stripped down aesthetic. He has described how this style evolved mainly because of economic limitations but it has now become a mission. It is hyper-intimate, placing audiences in an almost voyeuristic proximity to the actors.
We're no stranger to this in London as any playwright who has used our great off West End spaces such as the Donmar or the Park will attest. It's odd therefore that this has been landed in a large West End house with audience seats having to be added on stage. As someone joked to me, this might aid the intimacy of the piece, but trailing legs of gangly audience members are a trip hazard for the actors.
This one premiered in 2013 in Dallas and is a really impressive piece, delicately exploring our need for intimacy but also our need for escape. No doubt it has received its West End berth because of its lead, the extremely charismatic Joe Locke, star of Netflix's international smash hit Heartstopper.
The play centers around Jake (Locke), a young man fleeing his privileged east coast life, who arrives in Clarkston, a one-horse-town in remote Washington state. He takes a job at as a warehouse shelf-stacker at the local Costco. There he meets Chris (Ruaridh Mollica), a local whose dreams have been stifled by limited prospects and family obligations to his drug addict mother. Costco is the only option in the rural town which, like so many others, has been hit by economic stagnation. Their unlikely friendship, forged as they unload crates and stack shelves, becomes the emotional heart of the piece, as both men grapple with their desires to escape versus the pull of family. As their relationship evolves into a romance, albeit platonic, they face some tough choices.
Matters are complicated further as Jake has been diagnosed with a form of Huntington's disease and been told he won't see out his 20s. Normally the emotional blackmail of such dramatic 'deus ex machina' would make me recoil but Hunter's sensitive handling makes it work here.
The metaphorical driver of the piece is Jake's obsession with the explorers Lewis and Clark. He is reading Clark's diary and is only in Clarkston because he's following their route. There are jokey references to how Jake has a degree in Post Colonial Gender Studies from a very liberal arts college in Vermont. Chris, on the other hand, grew up in poverty, has never even seen the ocean and has had to overcome a crystal meth addled mother who not only stole his laptop the night before his finals but also wiped his bank account of the savings he'd scrambled together to pay for college and the escape to his dream of becoming a writer. Hunter wonderfully juxtaposes the boys' contrasting worlds and their differing attitudes to being out.
The two leads give wonderfully nuanced performances which elevate Hunter's understated text. Locke demonstrates the star quality we already knew he had but Mollica is a revelation, bringing layers of pain and hope and suffering to Chris.
As the apex in the triangle, Sophie Melville brings a touching poignance to the part of the mother, a survivor desperate to entice to Chris to move with away with her and make a new start. Her pleas are received coldly by him however, having been disappointed once too often.
Director Jack Serio does wonders in drawing out the play's gentle humor and the moments of tenderness help to offset the overall melancholic tone. Milla Clarke's stripped-down naturalistic staging, basically some shelving, emphasizes the monotony and isolation of the boys' lives and the supermarket life and Stacey Derosier's cold lighting reinforce the stasis that pervades Clarkston. Again though, this is staging choice that would work so much better in an intimate space. In the right hands the piece will also make an amazing film one day.
