Clarkston review: Joe Locke shines in Huntington’s-disease drama as a coming‑of‑age road trip unfolds in London’s West End

London’s Trafalgar Theatre hosted Samuel D. Hunter’s Clarkston, opening in the West End with Joe Locke—best known for Netflix’s Heartstopper—carrying the emotional weight as Jake, a recent East Coast graduate of Post Colonial Gender Studies who now finds himself on a solitary road trip that is less about destination and more about meaning. Jake’s itinerary leads him to Clarkston, Washington, where a sudden turn of events sets the stage for a story about love, fear, and the fragile bonds that keep people human in the face of a life-limiting prognosis.

The premise is stark and intimate: Jake, who has learned he carries Huntington’s disease and has eight years before dementia could take hold, stops in a Costco warehouse during the course of his journey. There, he works part‑time as a shelf stacker and meets Chris, played by Ruaridh Mollica in his stage debut, a young man wrestling with his own sexual identity in the shadows of a troubled upbringing. The encounter unspools into a delicate, slowly deepening connection that becomes the play’s core. Jake’s bucket‑list project—a structure that gives his road trip a pulse—propels the interaction, but the heart of Clarkston lies in shared moments rather than dramatic set‑pieces.

Locke’s performance anchors the production, and his American accent—an extension of his recent on‑stage versatility, including Broadway work as Tobias Ragg in Sweeney Todd—reads as both precise and plangent. The actor twitches with self‑doubt yet remains a conduit for the audience’s empathy as Jake threads care, fear, and an insistence on living in the moment. The role pushes Locke into more grounded, less typecast territory than his recent television fame, inviting comparisons with his Heartstopper persona without feeling like a rehash.

Director Jack Serio keeps the staging lean and raw. The set places parts of the Costco warehouse in the audience’s line of sight, blurring the boundary between performance space and real life and emphasizing the claustrophobic intimacy at the heart of Jake and Chris’s evolving bond. Hunter’s script leans into the quiet gravity of life’s ordinary rituals—the conversations, the small acts of generosity, the decisions we make when time is finite—rather than fashionable melodrama. The result is a slow‑burn drama that refuses sentimentality even as it demands emotional honesty from its players.

Sophie Melville’s portrayal of Chris’s mother adds a difficult, emotionally tight thread to the narrative. Her character embodies a history of poverty and instability that has left Chris with a pressing need to escape, and perhaps to find a pathway toward a creative dream—the kind of dream that might offer him an anchor or an exit from a childhood shaped by disruption. The dynamic between Jake’s cautious optimism and Chris’s guarded vulnerability provides the play’s emotional hinge, with Melville’s performance tightening the screws when the past breaches the present just as Jake’s prognosis casts a long shadow.

The West End premiere drew a celebrity‑heavy audience that underscored the production’s buzz. Attendees included Lily Allen, Max Harwood, Andrew Scott, and Cat Simmons, among others, a reminder that the show’s themes—identity, mortality, and the making of connection—resonate beyond the theatre’s walls. The reception has highlighted Hunter’s ability to render a modern American life with a universal ache: the fear of losing time, the remedy of human proximity, and the small, ordinary acts that can still feel like salvation.

Clarkston is not a grim, doom‑laden piece. Hunter’s writing is perceptive about the ordinary beauty found in connection and in the act of choosing to engage with another person despite life’s unanswerable questions. Serio’s production is careful to let the actors remain exposed, the emotional vulnerability never far from the surface. Some moments lean toward a documentary realism as Jake and Chris navigate risks, misunderstandings, and the possibility of a future that remains uncertain, while still finding moments of genuine tenderness that illuminate the resilience of human connection.

The play’s setting—a road trip that begins as a search for distance and ends as a search for meaning—offers Locke a platform to stretch beyond a familiar screen persona into a stage presence that can carry a quiet, cerebral drama. While the piece has been described as a conventional slice of modern American life, its strength lies in the specificity of its characters and the precision of its pacing. The dialogue is crisp, and the prevailing mood is one of restraint: a conscious choice to let the audience lean into the characters’ silences as much as their words, a technique that pays off in the most memorable exchanges between Jake and Chris.

Looking ahead, there is speculation about Locke’s future range. The performance has invited comparisons to classical forms, with commentators asking—albeit cautiously—whether he could translate the same intensity into a project like Hamlet. The question isn’t so much a prediction as a measure of the actor’s growing versatility: a sign that a performer who has already connected with a generation of viewers through a contemporary coming‑of‑age romance is now capable of carrying more complex, enduring material.

Clarkston’s London run marks a notable moment in Hunter’s ongoing dialogue with British audiences about American life and its intimate, universal concerns. The West End staging benefits from a production design that keeps the world tactile—whether it’s the hum of a Costco floor or the quiet ache of a relationship’s precarious balance—and from actors who can navigate the line between restraint and revelation with ease. Locke’s Jake, in particular, is a character whose vulnerability never collapses into melodrama, allowing the audience to inhabit the same uncertain moral space he occupies: the place where life, love, and the clock on one’s health intersect in the most human way possible.

As the reviews continue to land and the run progresses, Clarkston stands as a reminder that contemporary theatre can render difficult topics with a sincerity that is both intimate and expansive. For Locke, the show may represent not just a successful portrayal of a boy becoming a man under extraordinary pressure, but also an invitation to explore a broader spectrum of roles that demand depth, nuance, and a willingness to face the complexities of human frailty head‑on.