Review: Follow, Finborough Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Like the newborn lumbered on its teenage protagonist, Follow is ill-conceived. Spurious to the point of being spoofish, Dameon Garnett’s clumsy play dithers between gritty drama and hapless comedy, but fails to be either. Indeed, it almost fails to amount to anything whatsoever.

While sixteen year-old scouser Blake (Adam Redmore) struggles to adjust to the shock of fatherhood, best friend Reece (Oliver Gilbert) is babysitting some pills for a local dealer. Needless to say, amidst an endless flow of diaper-related emergencies, the pills disappear, flushed away by Blake’s infuriated father (Paul Regan). What follows is panic, tears and, eventually, happy families.

Essentially, Garnett’s script consists of little more than a series of sleepless nights undermined by a clunky attempt to up the stakes and inject contemporary relevance. Nor is it helped by his tendency to overwrite dialogue and underwrite characters beyond all creditability.

Add to this a fiction-destroying plastic baby and, admittedly, the actors have a raw deal. However, none of the three seem comfortable onstage, reacting with the time delay of a satellite link-up. In panting and ranting throughout, Gilbert and Redmore make unspecific and unconving teenagers and Follow becomes an increasingly tiresome paint-by-numbers drama that achieves tension without ever saying much or surprising.