“The UK has some of the fastest eroding coastlines in the world, disappearing at the rate of 4 metres a year.”
That’s the stark warning greeting the audience of the show Freak Out. It's something most of us are barely aware of. Yet as the British Geological Survey points out, some 30,000 properties are “now within 25 metres of potentially highly susceptible coast.”
The Coin Toss Collective takes us to the fictional town of Portsdown where the local community faces this potential danger with very little support from the government. Rather than build defences, the authorities offer just over twelve thousand pounds in compensation to those whose homes will be affected.
One by one, a cast of seven speak about the place they live and their worries about what might be lost, finishing what they say by placing a model of a home on different levels of a back structure.
The lively, fast-moving show shifts between these local people at a fundraising social in support of their campaign over the issue where a chocolate cake is distributed to the audience and a range of comic sketches.
Friendships are tested and the local councillor finds the stress so much she decides to move away from the danger.
Perhaps to imply complacency among the general public, a character in shorts and T-shirt dances onto the stage singing “I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside”, before recruiting two audience members to compete with each other in building a sandcastle. Later in the show, he returns to enlist two other audience members to compete in decorating the sandcastles.
At one point, the same dancing visitor is beaten to the ground with balloons by four other characters.
It’s an entertaining play performed by a confident, fluent cast that importantly draws attention to the horrors of coastal erosion. However, there is little plot or characterisation to generate dramatic tension or engage our sympathies. Although it warns against the lack of government concern and public complacency, the show can, by not indicating a cause in the corporate production of greenhouse gases, leave an audience feeling that it is just another inevitable product of natural change.