Virtual Lancaster

In a February still down to below zero every night, with too-recent memories of trudging down the road with other similarly shapeless people, all avoiding the lethally icy pavements, it’s not hard to empathise with one of the central ideas of It Snows: when it snows, things change, and it’s magic – for a while. The Dukes Senior Youth Theatre do full creative justice to Bryony Lavery’s short play written for an ensemble production.

We start by meeting one of the two main characters: the would-be photographer Cameron Huntley (Nick Wright). He’s bored – but then so are the other, less artistic lads, who give him a hard time in a beautifully choreographed scene featuring a large wheelie-bin. Cameron’s counterpart, Caitlin Amoretti (Anna Sainsbury), is a lover of drama and mime who also provides post-modern commentary on the play. Both are delicately characterised in Lavery’s script and both actors convince in performance. After dancing round each other Caitlin finally gets it together mimetically with Cameron at a bus stop. As a result, they miss the party hosted by Marlee Holmes-Spalding (played admirably by Rosa Cooper Davis), but luckily we do not, as Marlee is cleverly run rings round (literally) by friends she doesn’t recognise and gatecrashers she knows she doesn’t know who treat the malt whiskey and dining-room table in ways Marlee knows will result in big trouble. It Snows is in fact a visual treat throughout, as the ensemble shapes and reshapes itself, puts on white woolly hats and scarves, and throw snowballs at each other and the audience. That is – until the snow changes to slush, as it always does.

Louie Ingham’s production makes as much of the ensemble as the named characters. These young actors talk and dance in impressive synchrony: everyone is thoroughly individualised and at the same time profoundly part of a swift and smoothly-moving whole.