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Swann1719
Member
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Posted: Sun Nov 18th, 2007 10:37 am |
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So yesterday I went to see these two plays in my new stomping grounds. They were on tour from the National.
If you remember, Enda Walsh wrote Disco Pigs and wrote The Walworth Farce - the killer play of the Edinburgh Festival this year. And Mark Ravenhill is Mark Ravenill. They both wrote 50 minute plays aimed at teenagers. Chatroom by Walsh was about some cruel teenagers goading a fragile one to off himself on an online community called Chiswick is Opinionated. Citizenship was about a 16-year-old boy who can't decide if he's gay or straight.
They were ok. They were entertaining. Teenagers were there. I thought the characters were a bit one-dimensional in both plays - we had the stoner, Vicky Pollard, the self-harmer, the Kevin Federline type (do teenagers really move around like that??)
Great, energetic actors. Walsh's had more integrity as a play - Ravenhill ended his with an appalling Deus ex Machina.
The most interesting thing about the plays was that they both illustrated that today's youth are just as bored and unimpressed with the current gospel of multiculturalism and acceptance of difference as my generation was bored with yuppies and the gospel of capitalism back in the States.
I found this dance school in Cambridge and sometimes I take classes there with the teenagers in the school. It amazes me how they emanate this 1930's Berlin ennui. In one class, the instructor uses this Smiths type song about how nothing matters. All the kids sing along like little disillusioned robots. Damn. It's almost like they have decided that none of their choices really matter since they have been taught that all choices are equally valid.
Do you have a view on this?
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Nate88
Member
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Posted: Sat Dec 22nd, 2007 12:07 pm |
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"It's almost like they have decided that none of their choices really matter since they have been taught that all choices are equally valid." - being one of these teenagers, soon to leave the teen-age, i so very badly agree on this statement Swann. For everything now there doesnt seem a right or wrong answer, everything is based down to arguing that your opinion should be placed in the running along with everyone elses and with them being teenagers still apply the stereotype which is true...we're all lazy bastards.
I havent seen citzenship, it was on at the Lowery in manchester the same time as Peter Brook directed Fragments (of Samuel Beckett) so i opted for that instead. I had the pleasure though awhile back, to perform Chatroom with a youth theatre I was apart of at the time. I dont know how the performance you saw was staged, but i can picture it being very much the same, chairs, with everyone basicly remained seated throughout? I feel the play itself is really good, a tad wordy and the characters remain like you said - one dimensional, but i think the stock characters of the stoner, the bitch, the self harmer are needed in away...because it could be a quite didactic peice about how kids arent bullying to there faces asmuch, its bitching, and singling out of the internet. bare in mind, this was written before the myspace and facebook phenomenons blew up...and I lost my job, and almost got an injunction over taking the piss at some one elses (My bosess) expense over myspace...hence why I have a severe disdain for it, and know first hand that bullying over the internet can affect people.
erm...ye, maybe not. (that's me trying to be ironic :) )
Nath
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