Stage review: The Aliens, Bush Theatre

This undemanding fragment of Americana is a bitter-sweet oddity but compelling nonetheless.

At its heart are three winning performances from actors who smuggle on board beautifully weighted truths to prevent the whole helium-filled construct from wafting away.

Imagine a milder, kinder Jay and Silent Bob swapping a New Jersey store front for a coffee shop back lot. That is the rubbish-strewn domain of KJ (Ralf Little) and Jasper (Mackenzie Crook), writers, musos, bottle crate philosophers and world weary also-rans.

Annie Baker's short and gentle mood piece, under Peter Gill's direction, is rich with silences and echoing slang. This is the America of mumblecore, dreadlocks and paper cups in cardboard wraps.

KJ and Jasper's relationship is typically fraternal. In each other's faces when there's a cheap point to be scored but guarded and loyal when there's genuine peril - an assault on the heart or the nervous system, for example.

Mackenzie Crook takes his pseudo-serious persona and grafts on some personal pain, his voice rasping with anguish over life's simmering frustrations. Ralf Little flies in from a gentler place stoked up on 'shrooms and the sayings of his New Age mum but not without his own baggage.

Into this mix, as old as time and never-ending, enters jittery 17-year-old Evan who at first wants to shoo them from the coffee shop and later, before heading to band camp, joins them in their subversive low-key Independence Day revels.

For in the distance another America happens as the soccer moms and RV dads put on a display for July 4.

The slackers' absurdist lives act as a warning against lack of direction - they smoke, compose songs, quote Bukowski, bear scars and wrap about them all the dissolute fabric of unsuitable role models.

So Evan - nicely played by Olly Alexander - is hooked. Sort of.

In their turn, they see Evan as a blank slate, something on which to start the redress of their own injustices.

A deceptively clever and exquisitely sparce piece of work.

– From September 2010