So good and so raw that avoiding it might be the wisest course: Sea Wall reviewed

Sea Wall, by Simon Stephens, is a half-hour monologue about grief performed by Andrew Scott. The YouTube clip has been viewed more than 250,000 times. The habitual quirks and irritants of Stephens’s writing are all here: the inept jokes, the laddish swearing, the fascination with 1970s pop, the preference for males over females and the improbable back stories of the characters.

The narrator is an Irish cameraman who earns money photographing ‘cushions and digital alarm clocks’ for shopping catalogues. He tells us a bit about his wife and daughter (‘she was a Caesarean’), but he’s far more interested in his father-in-law, Arthur, a scuba-diving maths teacher who retired from the British army with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Arthur lives in the south of France where the family spend their summer holidays. ‘We watched an unusual amount of tennis together.’ The narrator remembers how his daughter screamed ‘like the living shit’ when she first encountered Arthur but later she came to relish his company. He imagines his baby’s thoughts as she raises her arms for attention. ‘Put me in your lap, put me in your story, now! You funny old fucker.’

During a philosophical debate the narrator asks Arthur if he thinks God might look like Gary Glitter. ‘He tells me not to be so bloody stupid.’ The script trickles along like this for 15 or so minutes but an unbearable calamity is about to strike. This is signalled, over-emphatically, on the eve of the annual holiday, when the narrator’s wife shows him her new backless dress. ‘I swear for about 30 seconds I couldn’t speak. And the idea that I was married to her. And we had our girl. And that this was our life!’ Clearly the fates can’t endure this level of happiness for long.