Rhona Foulis
posted 8 March 2006

Having triumphed at the Bush with How Love is Spelt in 2004, Chloe Moss returns with another play about relationships, this time between three teenagers coming of age in late 1980s Manchester. Where How Love is Spelt dealt with the alienation and awkwardness of first encounters, Christmas is Miles Away focuses on the alienation and awkwardness of first love and first friends, growing up and growing apart.

Sixteen-year old Luke and Christie are best mates. In a hilarious opening scene, we meet them camping in their favourite retreat, Boggart's Clough, escaping home, parents and puberty. But when underdog Christie gets lucky with Julie Bridges, the object of his adolescent affection, this third person threatens to rupture their brotherly relationship. 'It's like you're having an affair', Luke jokes. Moss astutely captures the tentative anxiety and unfamiliarity of first love and 'the first time'. A post-coital Julie deduces that 'the best thing is just to get it over and done with', as the couple put their arms around each other with amusingly cautious hesitation. Moss is a master at staging awkwardness and emotional ineptitude, to warm comic effect. After Christie's father's funeral, Luke distractedly skulks around Christie's room, offering only the comic condolence that the death is 'fucking well shit'. Teenage life is about evasion, not confrontation.

Luke is desperate to escape his life and run away 'to the middle of nowhere'. Restless with dreams of travelling abroad, he eventually joins the army as a means of running away. But the freedom that he had anticipated proves to be a wilful illusion. Luke returns home on leave an angry young man, having witnessed and photographed other soldiers torturing prisoners. Paul Stocker gives a remarkably detailed performance as Luke, whose veneer of self-confidence shatters to reveal a fragile, damaged core. Despite the complexity of character, Moss may have attempted too much, in touching upon issues that aren't fully developed. We learn that Luke's father kicks him out of their home, but no more of their relationship, or of his father's reaction to Luke's later attempted suicide. At times, Julie's character also feels like an appendage to the central male relationship.

Moss draws an accurate sketch of adolescence, replacing the cliché of youth's budding promise with the reality of social struggle and itching insecurity. We recognise the truthfulness of her insight into Luke's and Christie's unashamed anxieties and aspirations. What begins as a brotherly relationship of piss-taking, belying mutual compassion, matures into a parting of sorts, as each struggles to relate to the other's experiences. Moss writes some cracking banter, but all her characters are imbued with the same ability for witticisms and word-play, so that you detect the playwright's own cleverness peeking through her characters. However, the main disappointment with Christmas is its emotional structure and pace: the thigh-smacking comedy of the first half means that the dramatic tension, the impending threat of adulthood, perhaps arrives too late. It isn't until the second half that the drama really gets underway - with Christie's father's death and Luke joining the army - and we realise the significance of these teenagers' lives.

Despite the ambling pace of Sarah Frankcom's production, Christmas sparkles in its emotional truth. At the end, Luke feels 'older, but not in a good way, not mature or wise.' This is a play about the value of youth for living and failing freely, 'before you've got to do it all for real'.

Till 25 March 2006