REVIEW: Jess And Joe Forever, Lakeside Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Jess and Joe Forever.

Lakeside Theatre, University of Essex

20/10/16

4 Stars

Following it’s sold out run at the Orange Tree, Zoe Cooper’s gorgeous, beautiful play is on tour, and I highly recommend that you catch it if you can! Joe is Norfolk born and bred and wears willies and works the land. Jess holidays there every summer with her au-pair, (before she goes on her ‘real’ holidays with her family), and is too chubby for her summer dresses. They are from two different worlds, but this is a play about growing up, friendship, and about being outsiders. It contains the most remarkable, beautiful twist, which I won’t give away, but is so sensitively done that the audience gasp with emotion and affection.

Jess and Joe tell us their story as if it’s a school assembly, using microphones to amplify the other characters they play, correcting each other’s version of the story, and a patch of mud to convey the countryside.  Nicola Coughlan is wonderful as Jess, gauche and innocent, a vegetarian helping to birth cows and naming them, stuffing her face with Scotch eggs and observing her parent’s marriage falling apart, vulnerable and loveable. Rhys Isaac-Jones is extraordinary as Joe, with a dark secret that his performance and the script hints at, until it is revealed when he recounts his birth. Cooper absolutely nails they way young children speak, and then how teenagers communicate as Jess and Joe grow up together, and Joe’s presentation at the ‘Unit’ about the Egyptians is hilarious and deeply moving.

And on the surface, that’s it. A simple story simply told. Except the script has depths and depths of meaning and emotion, of what it’s like to be an outsider, to find each other, as Kate Bush once sang, “Every odd sock finds an odd shoe.” There were some diction issues, particularly on microphone, and watching it with a Norfolk native I was reminded that the accent wasn’t totally spot on- it sounded fine to me! But these are minor quibbles when watching this sensitive play and production. Bravo Zoe Cooper, you have written a memorable play, one of the best this year,  that deserves the widest audience possible!