April 11, 2011
National Theatre Connections, Oxford Playhouse, Mon 11 Apr 2011
This week Oxford Playhouse teamed up with National Theatre Connections to celebrate the talent of local youth theatre groups. Two promising local troupes - Oxford Actors Company and Stage Fright Theatre Company - performed thought-provoking new plays.Frank and Ferdinand by Samuel Adamson is a challenging and complex play that explores ideas of truth and myth-making, examining how we suppress the truth in order to see only what we want to see. This richly symbolic play tells the story of 130 children missing in a war-ravaged country and the four who are left behind to face a military enquiry. The group of 21 young actors in Oxford Actors Company – some of whom had no prior experience – rose to the challenge of this difficult piece, handling the script’s demanding emotional range remarkably well.
Douglas Maxwell’s play Too Fast was performed by the youth company Stage Fright. Although this was the weaker of the night’s performances, the cast’s attention to detail - combined with a handful of strong individual performances - made for a compelling show. The story is of Sensation Nation, a vocal group aiming to win next year’s Britain’s Got Talent competition. In the hope of cultivating a heartbreaking story to win the public vote, the group book to play at the funeral of a girl from their school who has been killed in a car crash. Focusing on the culture of TV talent shows and high school politics and romance, this play was perfectly suited to a teenage cast and the young actors were convincing in their roles.
Neither play shied away from weighty topics: grief, love, war – even rape – were thrashed out with impressive sensitivity and maturity. The teens also displayed a remarkable aptitude for comedy acting; the first play in particular contained a number of witty one-liners delivered with perfect timing.
Both plays, however, fell foul to the common pitfalls of youth theatre. Acting was occasionally wooden and not all lines were entirely audible. Overall however the standard was high. Indeed, across both companies actors performed with a professional attention to detail and threw themselves into the narratives with a heartfelt honesty symptomatic of their youth.