I Caught Crabs in Walberswick | Reviews

Edinburgh Festivals Magazine: "Try your hardest to catch this outstanding performance"

Written by Fringe First winner Joel Horwood, this is by far the best thing I have seen this year at the Festival, which might be surprising, given the name of the show.

It is a humorous yet realistic portrayal of teenage life and the issues they face, with the focus on two young men, competitive best friends living in sleepy town, and a self-destructive spoilt rich girl, eager for attention and craving the affection of her absent father. Boys meet girl and so follows an all too familiar sequence of drink, drugs and joy riding which all combine to effectively end the boys’ friendship forever in their attempts to impress ‘Danni’. All of them are approaching adulthood and starting to make decisions that will affect the rest of their lives, but are not yet mature enough to deal with the situations they encounter. The narrators, well-spoken adults, provide an interesting contrast. They also serve as the parental figures, supplying a wealth of characters to the minimal stage and showing the difficulties of parents attempting to communicate with their children on the cusp of being grown ups while also having to confront their deficits and see themselves through the eyes of their children. It is a gripping piece of drama, with superb acting from the entire cast, all displaying different idiosyncrasies yet at the same time being instantly recognisable as characters we encounter within our own lives. I would advise you to try your hardest to catch this outstanding performance.

Rebecca Hitchin

Joel Horwood's cheekily titled I Caught Crabs in Walberswick, produced by the Eastern Angles company, readily 'fesses up in it own publicity material to potential comparisons with the devastatingly good Skins. Drink, drugs, sex and posh girls are staples of Horwood, a fringe veteran from his musical, Mikey the Pikey, his celebrity chef-based Food and 2007's Trucktop and Stoopid F***en Animals.

Here, unlikely lads Fitz and Wheeler dodge impending exams and sex-talk trauma while fishing for the aforementioned crabs (well, what else did you think it meant?) before falling in with Dani, a well-bred wild-child. Together they embark on a joyride of erotic possibility, self-knowledge and potential self-destruction that sees them leaving childhood behind in a blaze of trashed glory.

Lucy Kerbel's riotous little production is framed by a pair of grown-up narrators who add to what amounts to a foul-mouthed youth club delight. Performed by a fresh-faced cast with abandon, any resemblance to prime-time fare makes this all the more wicked for it.