This is a much tighter, more straightforward play about a group of 18-year-olds who come together for a reunion but are haunted by something appalling which happened five years earlier. The tension is well-managed and it’s a long time before we finally discover precisely what the horror was. All we know is that the whole group was complicit in allowing their contemporary Tom Joy (Zion Serino-Rutherford) go to prison for something they know he didn’t do. He has now been released on licence. There are flashbacks to five years earlier with a double cast and that works nicely.

Serino-Rutherford is outstanding. His younger self – he’s the only one who doesn’t have a younger double – is enthusiastic, exuberant and relentlessly bullied by the others. In the scenes in which he is framed, both literally and figuratively, we see raw fear, confusion and cries for help. It’s quite a performance. Also excellent is Lewis Jackson as a boy who is now ill with cancer and determined, at last, to put things right  by telling the police the truth.

The whole cast is strong and very well-directed (Alan Wood & Sam Parker). There are no audibility problems this time and I really liked the groupings which change slickly each time there’s a flash and a blackout as we shoot back or forward five years.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/old-times/