The National Theatre’s New Connections festival of youth theatre continues at the Royal Lyceum this week. Lisa McGee’s The Heights, presented by Glasgow’s Craigholme School, reinforces a strong recurring theme permeating this season of new plays about young people struggling with isolation and alienation in contemporary urban society.
Is she really that much different to many other children and young people suffocating under constant parental supervision?
Lily Lee, a sickly teenager indefinitely confined to her flat in the eponymous council estate, passes the time by making up stories and obsessively watching the lives of others down below. Much like Jimmy Stewart’s character in Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window, her situation forces us to confront our own voyeuristic position as viewers/audience. But it also echoes the detached manner in which we in wider society – and indeed the other disparate characters on the estate – behave towards others, avoiding interaction with other human beings in our urban environment for the sake of our personal safety. With Lily’s mother isolating her ‘for her own good,’ for fear of something calamitous happening to her should she venture outside, is she really that much different to many other children and young people suffocating under constant parental supervision?
A bizarre confrontation by fellow estate dweller Dara leads to the two girls striking up an unusual friendship. However, the play makes much use of subjective, unreliable narrators suggesting that when Lily muses that sometimes she feels like she has made everyone else up, this could well be the case for the stories unfolding in front of us. Craigholme School’s simple but effective staging would have benefitted from more creative use of lighting design, particularly in the more stylised moments, but this is a minor quibble in an otherwise good solid production with a strong ensemble performance.
As the curtain rises, a dull electronic pulsing sound accompanies a teenage boy lying on a doctor’s examination table, his face scrutinised by a video camera with its image projected onto the backdrop upstage.
YUF Theatre Shetland provided the second part of Thursday’s double-bill with one of the multiple productions of Blackout by Davey Anderson in the Scottish section of New Connections. Taking Anderson’s tale of a teenage boy’s relationship with violence, waking up a in a jail cell and recalling the journey that has brought him there, YUF take the lesson in sociology several steps further, giving the play a very strong confrontational tone.
YUF utilise visually striking and arresting staging from the start. As the curtain rises, a dull electronic pulsing sound accompanies a teenage boy lying on a doctor’s examination table, his face scrutinised by a video camera with its image projected onto the backdrop upstage. One by one, members of the ensemble gather from seats in the audience, clad in garish white hoodies, to take their place in front of the stage, staring calmly and menacingly back at us.
The unfolding action is relentlessly underscored by effectively uncomfortable electronic sounds.
In a deconstruction of the playtext, all forty or so of the young actors become a chorus or indeed army of Jameses, bringing to the fore the message that this troubled teenager really could be anyone. The unfolding action is relentlessly underscored by effectively uncomfortable electronic sounds, while the backdrop with the projected image of the youth’s face steadily fills with nasty little images of dodgy white supremacist tattoos. All this plus the ol’ Brechtian trick of keeping the houselights up to prevent the audience from being lulled into a comforting sense of detachment, creates a genuinely gripping and unsettling piece of theatre.
See Lyceum website for tickets and info