Jess and Joe Forever

100487 original

Boy meets girl. Country meets town. Poor meets posh. Zoe Cooper’s adorable play looks like it deals in binaries, but is really about a connection that runs far deeper than any differences.

Joe lives in a village in Norfolk, populated by small-minded busybodies. He helps his dad on the farm; he doesn’t have a mum. Jess’s parents have a holiday home there; they bring her to the country so she can “learn to be a child". She flounces with faux confidence and big words, determined to befriend him; he’s taciturn, reluctant. But over a series of summer encounters, truths are revealed (no spoilers here) and the pair are transformed by one another.

Nicola Coughlan and Rhys Isaac-Jones are both excellent in this gem of a show. They play Jess and Joe from children, captured perfectly in Isaac-Jones’s twirled awkwardness and Coughlan’s puppyish buoyancy, to more troubled teenage years. The form here is that the pair are re-enacting their story for us, which lends both an emotional punch—they can’t help but well-up at restaging painful memories—and a theatrical self-awareness delivered with the lightest of touch. Moments when they find themselves taking on other characters in their story—or even playing each other—carry a real charge in Derek Bond’s production.

Cooper’s writing finds a sweet humour in the gawkiness of teenagers, and is well served by Isaac-Jones’s deadpan delivery, which nonetheless perfectly conveys the agony of being different at that age. Jess and Joe Forever feels gossamer-light, but that’s no criticism – in fact, its delicacy is its strength.