Review: FREAK OUT!

UK coastlines are crumbling fast. FREAK OUT! introduces the residents of a town under imminent threat of erosion; there’s the local politician who failed to secure funding for a sea wall, the publican who has a London flat to retreat to, and a farmhand whose family has always worked on the headlands. They’ve just been offered paltry compensation for losing their (now worthless) homes, and are bitterly divided: should they abandon ship, or stay and fight for that wall – even if it only delays the inevitable?

This is important and timely stuff, but Coin Toss Collective’s staging is uneven and wobbly. A spirited combination of physical theatre, spoken word, archival footage and party food, FREAK OUT! has plenty of energy but too little focus. Key storylines drop off their own cliffs, unresolved, while the crowd-work led by Sandy, a retro personification of British seaside nostalgia, leads us nowhere. Conversations between characters feel surface level and often bluntly oppositional – one is for the wall, the other is against – and do little to build a convincing sense of real community or loss. FREAK OUT! highlights the urgent consequences of climate change, but says little beyond the headlines.