Brighton Fringe: Why not go and see 'Infection'?

Brighton Fringe is here and there are many, many things to go and see all over the city. But for the moment the most important and unmissable thing is Bath Street Productions’ Infection, a play by Faye Woodbridge. And it’s on next week.

Two brothers and a brotherly/sisterly mate, into their twenties but barely, are trying to survive a zombie apocalypse (caused by an alien infection). As for their families, friends, civilisation...

Kids v. zombies (aliens) [the beautiful pedantry here]. It’s the culture clash – almost nothing can dent youth culture. Almost nothing.

It’s funny and it has a heart, it’s sending up the genres, it has the confidence and competence to be silly – it’s very Brighton. ‘Brighton’ usually results in a warm feeling when you find it in a venue, that familiarity of the local vibe.

There’s something about the early twenties: old enough and experienced enough to live, and yet also not. There’s the transatlantic youth culture. Into everything, always on. Show them a challenge and they want to compete and triumph. Energy, humour, fearlessness… Teflon optimism and enthusiasm between elastic bouts of drama and depression. The best years of their lives and they can still cry out in the rain in sopping hoodies.

And kids die. Accidents and health and crime do for us all, regardless of age. Seeing them face it, or the prospect of it, is electric. Infection has them facing death (the walking dead and mortality) from the start.

Young heroes, when they are truly both things, are fascinating subjects. Kids emulate adults in their own way, because being more grown up than your peers or the younger kids is the height of cool, prowess… whatever. And, more genuinely, life doesn’t pull its punches just because you’re young. Tough and rough shit happens. Kids recognise it and deal with it. They are often forced to learn the mechanics of adult stuff, and they perfect a face to put on when they need to be brave on adult terms.

But they are kids. In Infection, everything they meet has to have a precedent in a movie or TV show. They quiver and falter – vocally, physically and mentally – wondering why there’s no one to pull them off the front line. And they are heroes. They are faltering but they press on, using all the resources they have. They are fighting for each other and being incredible for each other. Just getting on with it is the heroic part: what’s the point in resenting the situation you’re in? It is what it is.

That bit in The History Boys, about lines in books that throw back the thoughts you imagined were yours alone and impossible to articulate:

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”

Experiencing a moment like that in the theatre, spoken, is a very different thing. With it literally voiced for you, you fill in the backstory and gaps in the dialogue from your own experiences and thoughts. And on stage the character is running on, speeding past that particular potent passage, so you hear the rest of the monologue or exchange as an extra layer of sensory experience as your thoughts about the characters and the universality of life’s stuff go deeper.

I suppose theatre is about leaving space, margins. It’s using the right evocative phrases and shifts in topic to give the audience enough to go on – so they can run their own imagery alongside the performance, fleshing it out even more, and personally.

And the space Infection’s characters inhabit, the youth space, is about wrenching you between the deep, sad and profound, and the laughable, cocky and ephemeral. The kids with huge and near-breaking hearts are also sticklers for correct jargon, slang and cultural references – the embryonic adulthood. They are big kids and small adults simultaneously and constantly.

And did I mention the zombies (aliens)?

Infection is at Upstairs at Three and Ten on 13^th-15^th May (18:30) and 17^th-18^th May (13:00)

Tickets available here: http://www.otherplacebrighton.co.uk/performances.php?eventId=3290%3A661

Bath Street Productions: https://www.facebook.com/BathStreetProductions