Review: Land of Lost Content, Arcola Theatre

Powerful spoken word theatre from playwright Henry Madd explores the highs and lows of small-town adolescence and the nuances of the friendships we make in these formative and turbulent years.  

Land of Lost Content. Photo by Ali Wright.

The premise of Henry Madd’s debut play, The Land of Lost Content, will be familiar to anyone who grew up in a small town. Reuniting in the local pub over cheap pints and surrounded by the perennial characters of their teenage years still propping up the bar, we meet Henry, who’s moved away and tried to move on from rural Dulowl, and his best friend Jake.

The two have known each other since secondary school and have the easy intimacy of long-term friends. However, as the play unfolds the audience becomes increasingly aware of the underlying gulf between them. Throughout their evening at The Flat Earth Inn, the two recount familiar stories of underage drinking, games of spin the bottle and sneaking out into the woods after dark. At the heart of these stories is the town of Dulowl, at once the enabler of their teenage antics and the parameters of a life that seems to have been pre-determined.

Henry describes his relationship with Dulowl as feeling as though he has a piece of elastic tied around his heart that keeps drawing him back. It is this tension that drives Madd’s script, which yearns for the easy nostalgia of returning to where you grew up, whilst being forced to confront the complex relationships you’ve left behind.

This heady mixture of emotions is captured brilliantly in Madd’s lyrical spoken word theatre. The two friends move easily from moments of laugh out loud comedy to heartbreaking tragedy. His writing is well-crafted and deeply evocative, infusing everything from memories of unreliable bus timetables to painful stories of substance abuse with a rich but accessible poetry.

Land of Lost Content. Photo by Ali Wright.

The play is a two-hander, with Madd himself playing Henry alongside an excellent counterpoint in Marc Benga’s Jake. The pair bounce off each other with the believable ease of old friends, and between them handle a diverse cast of small-town characters. We see the challenges of rural life played out in front of us in all its forms, from clueless headteachers to teenage boys in the throes of a mental health crisis with no one to turn to.

The Land of Lost Content is an important piece of theatre: tender and unapologetic, funny yet deeply moving. It gives a voice to people that are often outside of mainstream media, addressing complex but resonant themes of teenage friendship, mental health, and platonic and romantic love.

In the fragments of conversations that pass between Henry and Jake, Madd captures the nuances of friendships that come out of a shared childhood, spanning formative years and many different stages of life. Running at just over an hour, we don’t even make it to last orders at the Flat Earth Inn – but this is a piece of art that will stay with you long after closing time.

The Land of Lost Content is on at the Arcola Theatre 27 February – 2 March, before embarking on a UK tour. Find out more here.

Words by Ellen Hodgetts