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Clarkston
Trafalgar Theatre, London
Here we go again with Heartstopper actor Joe Locke.
The star of Netflix’s gay teen rom-com is once more knotted-up in will-I-won’t-I romantic agony – this time in Samuel D Hunter’s new play which opened in London’s West End to a buzzing celebrity audience including Andrew Scott.
The difference for Locke this time, is that instead of a gawky young schoolboy, Charlie, he’s a gawky young East Coast American graduate of ‘Post Colonial Gender Studies’, Jake.
In the middle of a solo road trip, he finds himself stacking shelves in a branch of Costco, in the small, Washington State town of Clarkston – 300 miles short of his West Coast destination of the Pacific Ocean.
And it’s in Costco that Joe meets fellow shelf stacker Chris (hot young stage debutante, Ruaridh Mollica), who just like Kit Connor’s rugby loving character Nick in Heartstoppers, is having a hard time coming out as gay.
But here’s the twist – the reason Jake is even in Clarkston is because he’s working on his bucket list after discovering he has the terminal genetic condition of Huntington’s disease, and has been told he’s got just eight years before he develops full blown dementia.
Joe Locke, the star of Netflix ’s gay teen rom-com is once more knotted-up in will-I-won’t-I romantic agony – this time in Samuel D Hunter’s new play
Joe pictured attending the press night after party on Thursday
By curious coincidence, it was announced this week that there is at last a treatment for this cruel ailment which slowly steals your life.
Sad though that often is, the play is not however at all depressing.
Instead it’s about the beauty of making connections which release you from the pain of life’s false hopes and unavoidable fears.
That’s how Locke’s character Jake is able to forget about over-weening parents who were he says ‘super ok’ with his coming out at 15 – while failing to get his continuing uncertainties.
And Locke shows himself to be as fine an actor on stage as he is on screen, twitching with self-doubt – while doing a flawless American accent (honed perhaps playing apprentice butcher Tobias Ragg in Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd on Broadway last year).
Chris meanwhile maybe super-awkward and want his sexuality buried in a concrete bunker, but he has bigger problems in the shape of a meth-addicted mother who persistently disrupted his childhood.
Having had to struggle with poverty in ways that Jake never has, his big hope now is that he can raise the cash for a course in creative writing.
So, the return of Chris’s mother, just when he thought he’d shaken her off, leaves him seriously compromised.
The play opened in London’s West End to a buzzing celebrity audience including Lily Allen
Max Harwood was seen posing up a storm on the red carpet
Andrew Scott was also in attendance
Cat Simmons beamed for the cameras at the event
Not only is she a needy, manipulative addict, Sophie Melville’s performance really tighten the emotional screws.
Hunter’s story is a very conventional slice of modern American life, and it’s a slow burn, pivoting on emotional nuance and the pains of intimacy.
But that doesn’t make it sappy, and director Jack Serio’s production is careful to keep the actors looking raw and exposed on a set which has some of the audience sitting on the Costco warehouse stage.
Now Locke has nailed this kind coming of age part, it could be time to test his undoubted talents with something more classical.
Is Hamlet too much of a Heartstopper?
