Scarborough, the play

Scarborough: Double lessons in forbidden love
Dominic Cavendish reviews Scarborough at the Royal Court Upstairs

What a difference a decade makes. Back in 1995, Sarah Kane violently shook the new writing scene awake with Blasted, a play that put a young woman and her older lover together in a Leeds hotel room and then let barbarism and cruelty storm in unannounced.

Now, at the same address (the Royal Court Upstairs) here's a play set in the bedroom of a Scarborough B&B in which a couple - a generation apart in age - are enjoying a "dirty weekend".
There's no gunfire, no eye-gouging, just the steady drip-drip disappointment of a disintegrating, unsustainable relationship. The piece's shock value, such as it is, lies in a relationship straddling the age of consent, involving a teacher and a pupil.

Though rightly seized on as a find when it was first seen at the Edinburgh Festival last year, when transplanted to London Fiona Evans's Scarborough proves touching and often funny, but struggles to stir unexpected flickers of controversy, despite its subject and its novel devices.
The first, established last time, is to range the audience among the furniture of a meticulously recreated B?&?B room, complete with peeling floral wallpaper and wall-mounted Charles and Diana commemorative plates.

As you stand, sit or crouch, sometimes only inches away from the actors, you're left with no easy moral high ground to retreat to. Director Deborah Bruce puts us in the position of voyeurs; the normal boundaries have been blurred.

Equally neat is the way that, for this London run, we see the same situation twice, with the roles reversed. So, in the first half, we pry on 29-year-old Lauren (a wistful-eyed Holly Atkins) and Jack O'Connell's lithe, cocksure Daz, her PE pupil of 15, going on 16.

After the interval, we hear the same lines - barring a few minor adjustments - uttered by Aiden (a doleful, shifty Daniel Mays) and Rebecca Ryan's coolly self-possessed teen Beth.

What do we learn, amid their fun, frolics and verbal fights?

That perhaps we are conditioned to accept it as natural enough for a lusty lad to dive on top of a woman old enough to be his mother and roll about in the sack with her - but that we instinctively recoil in mild alarm at the sight of a grown man petting a girl young enough to be his daughter.
And, perhaps, we also glean that the male of the species copes less well with rejection.

Evans has touched on a source of fascination - and her dialogue has just the right combination of away-day brightness and sudden overclouded despondency to ring true.

I loved the way the teenagers seem old beyond their years yet engage in childish wind-ups and positively whoop at the sight of a games console gift. The writing captures the confidence of fresh-skinned adolescence versus the self-doubt and panic of those past the first flush of youth.
Yet none of the parties looks as if they're going to be permanently damaged by this anti-climactic weekend away. The play's called Scarborough but the scars don't, in the end, run all that deep.