‘Home’ for up-and-coming playwright DC Moore is — or rather was — Northampton. Town, his gripping, well-acted new contribution to the Royal&Derngate’s Hometown season, casts an appraising eye over the place of his upbringing. The result is hardly a flattering portrait of the town although, to be fair, Moore’s observations about overweight, badly dressed, frequently drunken, shamefully ignorant young people might apply to almost everywhere else in modern Britain, not excluding Oxford.

The play (director Esther Richardson) is inspired by the 19th-century poet John Clare, who in 1841 walked 80 miles from an asylum in Epping Forest to his home near Peterborough. (Walking seems to loom large in Moore’s oeuvre; his one-man play Honest, seen at Northampton’s Mailcoach pub in March, concerned a laddish civil servant’s drink-drenched nighttime trudge across London.) Town introduces us to John (Mark Rice-Oxley, pictured), a clearly troubled man too, who has quit his job in human resources and trecked from London to Northampton, there to spend the next month in bed.

Why he has done this and what personal demons he has to contend with are details that gradually emerge during the course of the 90-minute play, which is performed without interval on the stage of the Royal, the audience ranged on either side of the action.

Scenes are divided between home life with his good-sort, if distinctly politically incorrect dad (Fred Pearson) and edgily over-fussy mum (Karen Archer) — the source of her problem is another intriguing feature of the play — and his forays out into the town.

These are usually in the company of one or sometimes both of the two girls in his life, long-time pal Anna (Joanna Horton) and sixth-former Mary (Natalie Klamar) whom he agrees to help with her university application. The first brings a thrilling directness to all her speech, especially when concerned with Northampton’s architecture. Of one project, designed for the town’s young professionals — a non-existent breed, she says — she tells John: “We are standing on the product of a diseased mind.” One suspects that something of the writer’s own ‘uni’ experiences may have gone into scenes with Mary — in one we learn of an Oxbridge interview in which John’s attempt to seem clever is undermined by his repeated pronunciation of ‘stoics’ as ‘stoyks’. Whoops!

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