Review: I ♥ Peterborough, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Peterborough, for me – as, I guess, for a lot of people – is a train station. A bog-standard train station, in fact, with long concrete platforms, white metal stalks, blue corrugated roofing and a WHSmiths. The sort of station that, by saying nothing about a place, tells you all you need to know.

Joel Horwood’s play confirms those assumptions – of overcast, small-town banality – even as it pledges allegiance and affection. It is at once an ode to and a rant against; one clouded by the fondness of formative experiences and the frustrations of clipped wings; one that seems to say, “This may be a shithole, but it’s my shithole.”

For a long time, I ♥ Peterborough is harder to pin down. That’s largely to do with Horwood’s direction, which – watched in a certain way, probably the wrong way – makes his text seems slipperier than it actually is. In fact, for the first half, I was utterly adrift in this little shot of bleak tenderness. I didn’t know who was who and what was what.

It was the fake cigarette that did it. On a raised platform in the middle of the stage, there’s the corner of a living room, wallpapered in ochre florals. It doubles as a stage, lit by two footlights, that could be the corner of a grotty local pub. On it are two men; one sat behind a keyboard, younger, in a sequinned bow tie and bagger blazer; the other naked but for compacting briefs and smeared make-up. The older man puts on a bra, stuffs it with chicken fillets, and slides into an airy satin gown. He pulls out an electronic cigarette, glowing green at the tip.

And, that single act throws everything into question. The e-cigarette represents a real cigarette, right? So by extension the man in women’s clothes could represent a woman. Or, given Scotland’s ban on smoking onstage, the e-cigarette might not be all that problematic – a witty gag, best glossed over – and the man in women’s clothing could represent, well, a man in women’s clothing. You see my difficulty.

Now the dilemma is that I don’t think that was Horwood’s intention as director, but the fluid multiplicity, the shifting sense it caused, was also what I initially loved about I ♥ Peterborough. The staging seemed to turn Horwood’s text inside out and back again. Swirling around in this story – first a love-story between a man and a woman, then another, between father and son – I found this indistinct, expressionistic sense of Peterborough the place poured off the stage. The city was the only thing that felt solid.

And, boy, does Horwood treat it beautfilly, skimming through the decades and musical trends, alighting on race riots and ingrained homophobia, sweeping through the identikit high street chains that set up shop. You feel it as a city that dresses to impress, but still looks cheap; one that applies concealer to the cracks, where blood and lipstick blend. Insular and dysfunctional. Grimy and incestuous and a world in itself, comfortably awful. It is both heart and ♥.

All this seeps out of Horwood’s gorgeous text, swirling and dizzy, like Enda Walsh ripped out of Ireland and replanted in the Fens. It’s full of sumptuous morsels: brick dust on breath, mixed donner smiles, car crashes between legs.

Gradually, for me at least, it coheres into a quietly devastating tale of betrayal; a son (James Taylor), bullied and awkward, who backs his father – both literally, on the keys, and more – and a father (Milo Twomey), who fails to return the favour the following day, trotting off on the pull instead. Eventually, flight is the only option. Or, as Hew – the distraught son – puts it: “Sometimes you have to blow things up, so you can start again.”