It was a busy night at the Burton Taylor Studio, with two short plays being performed one after the other. The first of these plays was a student performance of Citizenship, written in 2015 by Mark Ravenhill and produced by Nightjar Theatre Productions. Citizenship follows the story of Tom, a boy embroiled in GCSEs and teenage social angst, who is also trying to work out his own sexuality, confused and upset by a recurring dream where he doesn't know whether the person he's kissing is a man or a woman. Citizenship is a short play that packs in a lot of content, as we follow Tom through school and his first attempts at sex to his arrival in the more adult world of college and semi-regular dating. It initially has a lot of promise - the opening scene, where Tom faints during a botched ear-piercing by his friend Amy, is fantastically written, and the actors' performances as awkward teenagers had the audience laughing out loud.
However, despite being written fairly recently, Citizenship missed the mark in its representation of bisexuality and queer identities. The play sets out to portray the confusion and emotional pain that some gay and bi teens experience in their first negotiations of a world that assumes heterosexuality. Unfortunately, this ultimately came across as representing bisexuality itself as a deeply unhappy state of being, with no positives for the older Tom to look forward to. Tom is repeatedly told that he has to 'choose' - to pick a side, gay or straight, rather than simply existing as a bisexual man. This, along with the final scene's juxtaposition of a heterosexual relationship as happy and a same-sex one as loveless, casual, and about nothing more than 'sex, money and fun', does a disservice to queer relationships and identities, and undermines the play as a whole. So, too, does the repeated homophobic bullying from Tom's peers. While LGBT youth still face hostility and aggression, and these problems to be recognised and represented, the play seemed to revel a little too much in these scenes. In the end, despite this message being parroted at Tom, it was the play itself that couldn't seem to decide what it wanted to be.
The cast did a lot to counterbalance the problematic content of the play itself with some skilled performances, particularly from Henry Waddon as Tom and Harry Berry as his long-suffering teacher De Clark. The production was at its strongest when it was exploring teenage awkwardness and melodrama, in some excellent scenes which were much funnier than the diversions into homophobic jokes. The performers used the sparse set well, and there was some great physical humour, as well as some truly affecting emotional moments. I feel that the actors' talents would have been better served if the play had been adapted to portray bisexual and gay relationships in a positive light, and I look forward to seeing them in other productions on the