Harry Melling’s Jason is a young man grieving his father. His religious mother, Janie Dee’s Margery, has pressganged him into joining a church group but when he helps out with their puppet show, the consequences for all concerned are most extreme. As the sock puppet companion he creates, Tyrone, quickly becomes a conduit for all of Jason’s repressed teenage emotions, whether lust for Jemima Rooper’s downbeat Jessica or retaliation towards Kevin Mains’ bullying Timothy, the puppet takes on a manic life of its own.
Equally though, there’s no doubting that this will be an utterly marmite production as it takes no prisoners, it will either click with your sense of humour or it really won’t. And even if it does, the joke it tells gets stretched out fairly thin, there’s little of substance to Askins’ writing as it skates idly over the bigger issues it touches upon, leaving the heavy lifting to underworked polemics that book-end the production. What do you do with a BA in English? Write a better play to support your jokes.