punkplay, Southwark Playhouse, review: 'The troubled dynamic is beautifully handled'

Gregory S Moss's 2009 play is now receiving its UK premiere

A scene from punkplay at Southwark Playhouse (Helen Murray)

The characters in punkplay may zoom around on roller skates, but this show is a pretty far cry from Starlight Express. Gregory S Moss's 2009 play, now receiving its UK premiere, is set in Reagan-era America and follows two teenage boys over the course of a fraught year when they discover the anarchy and rebellion of punk rock and strive to reinvent themselves (none too successfully) as the scourge of the “redneck robot assholes” of stifling suburbia.

The voiceover intro – telling us that if the 1970s were the scrotum and the 1990s the anus of civilisation, the 1980s were the bit of skin in between – gives a fair indication of the tone of what's to come: crude, surreal, and sometimes outrageously funny as the piece erupts in a succession of sketches.

Tom Hughes's well-acted production generates just the right spirit, pitched between a lively sense of the ridiculous and an unblunted empathy with the raging energies and underlying sadness of adolescence. Anyone who tried to clutch at a sense of identity, in their teenage years, through over-zealous allegiance to a subculture will laugh and wince with recognition at punkplay.

Having just been kicked out by his father who wants him to go to military school, Duck (Matthew Castle) asks to stay with his geeky, more conventional friend, Mickey (Sam Perry). Scene by scene, we watch the pair adopt the trappings of punk (from mohawks to brotherhood-burns) and vie over some of the most- and least-likely names for their projected band, before deciding on The Zoo Sluts, pinched from the title of a porn video they viewed together. For would-be iconoclasts, they're peculiarly naïve: Mickey explains to Duck that an IUD is a test you can take so that you don't have to finish high school. But eventually the drab curtains of the suburban bedroom are swept apart to disclose a tinsel-draped inner-stage-of-the-mind where the pair thrash out their furious harangues: “I don't need your fuckin' rules” against walls covered in the Black Flag posters.

Castle arrestingly conveys how Duck covers up his insecurities by becoming a dogmatic purist about punk, bullying Perry's lanky, more sensitive Mickey for not being “punk enough” as he relishingly smashes his friend's family record collection (Monkees, Louis Armstrong et al) with a hammer and declares that “You are either with us or against us”. The irony that, in relation to this subversive music, he is demanding the kind of conformity that he despises elsewhere is lost on Duck. Not in the end on the distraught Mickey, though, who tells his mate that he's “nothing but a cop with a mohawk”, provoking a climactic fight that veers, revealingly, in and out of a slow-dance homoerotic snog under the glitter balls.

The troubled dynamic between the two is beautifully handled. All the other parts are vividly played by Jack Sunderland and Aysha Kala who appear, respectively, as Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and a nubile chorus girl wearing a withered Ronald Reagan mask in Mickey's bizarre, cough-medicine-induced fantasy about losing his cherry. I could have done, however, without the 11th hour explanation of the roller skates – the one sequence where the symbolism feels decidedly flat-footed.

To October 1; 020 7407 0234