Back in March, I saw a fine revival of Simon Stephens’ 2001 play about
troubled, inarticulate teenagers,
Herons,
at the National Student Drama Festival. It is gratifying to see that
its director Clive Judd has been given the assistant directing seat on
Sarah Frankcom’s production of Stephens’ 2009 play about troubled,
inarticulate teenagers,
Punk Rock.
This is not to imply that he is going over old ground: the earlier play
is set among East London’s working (or non-working) class, whereas this
one takes place in a Stockport grammar school. Indeed, it is
significant that such a play about a British Columbine is set not only
in greater Manchester (just, coincidentally, as the trial begins of two
boys who planned such an event in the area) but in a public school in
the British rather than the American sense.
Such adolescent explosions, Stephens argues, are nothing to do with any
particular kind of deprivation, social or otherwise. In the final
scene, protagonist William goes through a litany of questions: did he
do it because of family pressures, or the girl he fancied, or the music
he listened to (the play’s title is a blatant misdirection), or the
Internet, or... or...? In each case, no. We watch a knot of half a
dozen teens in the deserted sixth-form library following the usual
dynamics of peer pressure and power games, quite often unpleasant but
only pathologically so in the case of the suavely vicious Bennett
(Henry Lloyd-Hughes). What becomes apparent is that each has a
desperate coping mechanism: it may be turned inwards as with Cissy’s
anorexia or cool, manipulative newcomer Lilly inflicting burns on
herself, it may be intellectual nihilism as with the geeky Chadwick, or
it may be Bennett’s sadism... but once any such strategy is disabled,
once active conduct becomes impossible and/or fantasy is devalued even
in one’s own eyes, then, as with the edgy, socially maladroit William,
the string snaps.
As so often with Stephens, a bleak series of narrative events contrives
somehow to nurture a kernel of affirmation for those of us watching. As
Lilly (the ambiguously compelling Jessica Raine) says in an
author’s-message moment, "99% of the young people in this country do a
really good job of the actual work of being alive." The casting also
shows a commitment to authentic youthful experience: four of the
central six actors, including an excellent Tom Sturridge as William,
are making their professional debuts here.
Written for the Financial
Times.