Suicidal, damaged teens dominate the stage in this revival of three 50-minute plays from last year’s Shell Connections festival of youth theatre.
The evening kicks off with Enda Walsh’s Chatroom, a powerful and disturbing piece about Jim, a depressed 15-year-old, who looks for help online. But the internet is as much a magnet to bullies as any school playground. Walsh’s zippy, often funny, dialogues certainly put the chat into chatroom and his story of rebels without a cause is emotionally engaging.
By contrast, Deborah Gearing’s Burn is a sprawling, noisy epic that follows Joey (aka Birdman), an unwanted teenager, as he journeys down the river in Southampton. It’s a large, ensemble piece that conjures up a whole community of troubled teens in all their strutting, posturing and occasionally charming reality.
But the highpoint of the evening is Mark Ravenhill’s gloriously foul-mouthed and deliciously naughty Citizenship, which uses the name of a recent addition to the school curriculum to examine ideas about youthful identity, as Tom tries to work out whether he’s really gay or not. Brilliant and often hilarious, dialogue makes this a highly enjoyable play.
On Jonathan Fensom’s effective sets, with their orange and black chairs, Anna Mackmin directs with clarity and vigour. Her large young cast includes excellent performances in a number of roles from Andrew Garfield, Andrea Riseborough, Matt Smith, Sid Mitchell and Claire-Louise Cordwell. Although the issues in these plays tend to come at you with their pants down, this is youth theatre at its very best.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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