Clarkston, review – Joe Locke is the draw, but there’s little else on offer in this tale of drifters

One of the only criticisms hurled at Netflix’s endearing, hugely popular queer teen drama Heartstopper has been that it’s overly sanitised. Sexless, even. But if you were expecting its star Joe Locke to use his stage debut to break free and test himself to his limits (like Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, who bared body and soul in psychosexual drama Equus), then you might well be disappointed by his turn in Samuel D Hunter’s dour love story Clarkston.

All the clichés of romantic coming-of-age stories are here, familiar and bland as cornflakes. Locke plays Jake, a twentysomething manic pixie dream boy with a terrible disease (juvenile Huntington’s). He wants to make his final years matter, so he’s on a quixotic quest to retrace the steps of pioneer William Clark, his distant relative, who expanded North America’s frontiers two centuries ago. Then, stacking shelves in a Costco at his route’s starting point in Clarkston, he meets stoic, semi-closeted local guy Chris (Ruaridh Mollica), who’s never seen the ocean. Can you guess who’s going to show it to him?

Locke’s on familiar territory with this role as an awkward, privileged young man who'll smash a $5,000 television just to show his would-be boyfriend he’s annoyed. Mollica’s got more to work with, and he really does bring some welcome depth to his world-weary shelf-stacker, who alternates his shifts with tense conversations with his troubled mother in the car park. Sophie Melville delivers a subtle, sympathetic performance here as Trisha, even if she’s too young to convincingly embody the worn-down, meth-addicted single mum of a teenager.

We’re in an era where therapists often advocate going “no contact” with dysfunctional family members, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the version of personal growth that Jake advocates for is Chris cutting off his struggling mum. Still, what is surprising is how little interest Hunter takes in the colonial resonances of this story. Early on, Jake tells us that he went to a liberal arts school to major in “post-colonial gender studies”. This weak satire of “woke” values gets a cynical laugh, as it’s designed to. But if he actually studied post-colonialism, why would he be obsessed with a pioneer who stole millions of acres of Native American land, while writing thoughtful musings on the “savage mind” in his diary? Hunter acknowledges this tension without coming close to interrogating it: reading aloud from Clark’s diary, Jake swiftly glosses over its uncomfortable phrases.

There’s an intriguing bleakness to this depiction of modern-day Frontier territory – the big box stores, the paradoxical lack of opportunity in these wide open spaces, the freeway rushing by. In different hands, perhaps the clash between the thorny past and the sanitised present could feel more vivid (another of Hunter’s plays, The Whale, was adapted into the appallingly bleak 2022 Darren Aronofsky film, which won Brendan Fraser an Oscar.)

Director Jack Serio’s staging here is cramped by this production’s unhelpful decision to put extra audience seating on the stage. Even vast amounts of haze can’t conceal the fact that this was clearly an economic choice, not an artistic one. This play won’t necessarily disappoint Locke’s fans, who’ll pay a top ticket price of £135 for this cheaply staged, 100-minute drama – but it lacks the passion, authenticity and political bite that might make them theatre lovers for life.

‘Clarkston’ is on at Trafalgar Theatre until 22 November; tickets and information here