Brighton Year-Round 2024
Zero for the Young Dudes
ThirdSpace
Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Theatre, Youth Theatre
Venue: Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts. University of Sussex, Gardner Centre Rd, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9RA
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
So just what is theatre FOR ?
Especially young people’s theatre. While it’s not necessarily a bad thing for older folk to be entertained by situation comedies and historical romances, surely youngsters deserve offerings that challenge – help them make sense of the world they find themselves in.
And if they discover that things are bad – to gain the confidence to speak out and DO something about it. It’s their future, after all . . .
Review
ThirdSpace Theatre members have obviously gained a great deal of confidence by working together. They may be lacking in years, and in some of the technical skills that more seasoned actors have acquired; but they powered across the wide stage at the Attenborough Centre – seventeen actors determined to give us a riveting image of a dystopian future. A warning.
I’m writing this the morning after the performance. November 5, 2024. It’s very possible that Donald Trump will be elected US President today, and he’s threatening to suppress and imprison his political opponents. Not just Trump – In many other countries, too, autocratic rulers are locking their citizens away. We seem to be sleepwalking into an Orwellian future.
Forty years after the actual year of 1984, Alistair McDowall’s play is set in some kind of internment camp for young people. They’ve been arrested after being involved in violent actions against an oppressive Government, and ended up being held somewhere in the countryside, behind three layers of razor wire.
We first meet them at mealtime, in the camp refectory. Two tables set below the front of the stage with inmates on each side, being thrown hunks of bread by two ‘trusties’ walking above them on the stage itself. The cyclorama at the rear of the stage could be lit with a variety of colours, and for this scene it was a shivery blue, while a guard strolled back and forth just in front of it; watchful, but silhouetted into black anonymity.
And they’re planning escape. They are young, so the plans aren’t always realistic, but there’s a steely determination from most – especially those who’ve been directly involved in fighting, and seen friends bleed to death in front of them. And they have grenades, which they share out and are planning to use later that night.
It’s hard to produce an effective portrayal of life inside what’s essentially a prison camp, but Angela el-Zeind’s direction gave us a number of unforgettable vignettes.
It seems that people can get shot here – we saw some guards firing from one of the auditorium’s balconies. The punishment for lesser breaches of the rules, though, is solitary confinement. Toby Thorpe’s lighting created a stark square in the centre of the stage, and we saw one of the inmates sitting on a box in the shaft of light, bored and lonely, bouncing a tennis ball off the floor between his knees. Repetitive bounces. Bonk. Bonk. Bonk. The isolation cell is obviously under surveillance, though, and a figure on another balcony at the side of the auditorium issued a peremptory command to stop. “You’re not allowed to have a ball in here!” All the prisoner’s attempts at conversation were rebuffed, and when he told the guard that he’d been sentenced to two whole days in solitary, and asked “How long have I been here so far?”, he was told “Twenty minutes …” Hard to think of a better illustration of how time drags under the trauma of being locked away.
But Censorship can be even more frightening than Solitary. The inmates are required to send letters home to their families – to reassure them that their loved ones are being well looked after. One young man read out his letter to us, and at every criticism of the camp regime, a loudspeaker replaced his words with ‘acceptable’ phrases, telling the letter’s recipients that the writer was in good spirits and ‘enjoying the comradeship of the camp’ while he learned new skills. Lewis Collins’ sound design was pitch perfect – the harshness of a loud klaxon followed by the booming voice of authority drowning out the youngster’s pleas. Chilling.
There were occasional lapses in vocal delivery, with several actors not being sufficiently audible or delivering their lines rather too fast, but in their physical movements the cast were brilliant. Director el-Zeind had choreographed the group activity cleverly, so that when they were queuing in line for the washroom, stretched out right across the stage; or plotting with their neighbours in the refectory; or taking part in a general melee, it looked – authentic. Not easy to achieve with seventeen actors.
And more. Within the overall group activities, individual cast members were interacting with others very believably, with lots of eye contact and physicality. Their timing was excellent – I constantly felt I was watching a set of real people, each with their own personal body language. They have obviously done a lot of work – and it shows.
The background to the inmates’ internment is, of course, the general breakdown of civilization – whether from the power-grabbing actions of governments or from the destruction of our environment by greed and overconsumption. Thomas Martin’s jumpy video clips, projected huge onto the back wall of the stage, featured fragmented moments from news footage of conflict or devastating storms, before the images dissolved into a sea of pixellated static.
One of the young inmates talked about how she and her comrades had torched the Town Hall and some of the other civic buildings in her locality, in protest against all this. As she put it –
“If you butcher my future, I will massacre your past”
At the close, it initially felt weird to have video images from the nineteen sixties, along with the lyrics from Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’
I was listening to Bob Dylan in my teens, for God’s sake – sixty years ago, along with these young people’s grandparents !!
But – it’s a measure of Bob Dylan’s genius that, in a week where climate change has killed hundreds in floods in Spain, and their government seems unable to respond effectively, we heard the great man sing
Come gather round people wherever you roam / And admit that the waters around you have grown / And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone / if your time to you is worth savin’ / Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone / For the times, they are a-changin’
For the times, they are a-changin’
By the time you read this review, we’ll have the first inkling of whether they are changing for the better, or for the worse.
Strat Mastoris
Strat Mastoris
