June 28, 2011
It’s great to know that there is real young talent out there in theatre land , or fringe land, or wherever land this impressive, thought provoking, moving, funny and original bit of drama does land.
Wherever it pitches up, the audience can expect to be left with a range of emotions, including basic wonder at how one woman - girl - or at least a young woman doing a darn darn fine impression of a teenage girl, has the sheer energy to talk, and talk, and talk more, in a relentless diatribe, for more than an hour. At times I was willing her to take a breath, and relieved when she did, but it was never merely a functional act of drawing in the air to enable her to continue relaying a script. So observed is Jack Thorne’s writing and so knowing, Joe Murphy’s direction, that every inhalation, every puff, sigh, involuntary hiccup, forced laugh and self conscious giggle, served to bring almost painful realism to the character.
Rosie Wyatt, the actress narrating the story of a particularly troubling incident in her daily life, and at the same time allowing us an insight into the danger-fraught mental and emotional jungle that is her world, was entirely believable throughout. I doubt there was a person in the room who couldn’t relate in some way to Katie. You didn’t need to have ever been that troubled teen girl, or know the kind of characters she described, or have ever set foot in Luton, where the reported action takes place (in fact, in one of her many directed comments to the audience, she rightly conjectures that most of us probably never have!). We may not be able to empathise, but everyone in the room, from the school kids to the seasoned reviewers (ahem) would recognise Katie as that friend or school colleague, or just the girl in the group hanging out around the newsagent, playing at being the worldly wise woman, putting on the swagger and front that hides a bottomless pit of insecurities and self loathing.
The performance is captivating - so much so that I had to remind myself to take a look from time to time at the black and white pencil line animation being projected onto the white screen that fills the entire stage behind our narrator. It’s important, and someone has taken a lot of effort to make it pertinent to the story we are being told. When I did pay attention, particularly towards the end of the piece, I noticed how the picture is being slowly filled in stroke by stroke, mirroring the gradual fleshing out of Katie’s character as her tone of voice, mannerisms and the emphases of her comments reveal her secret self.
The drawings become more intimate in their subject too. We start with a tall wall and the top of an otherwise obscured building that’s immediately recognisable as a school. Then comes the street and the car - an important prop - shop fronts and a housing estate. We’re still in pretty generic territory, but as the story intensifies and Katie and the other members of the ‘crap gang’ in which she has inadvertently found herself move in on their prey, so the focus of the sketches also closes in. Now we are shown a house front, the bricks and curtains and roof tiles are drawn in, and then we’re taken inside, into a home. The story suddenly becomes so much more fraught with suspense and the lingering sense of impending dread heightens, as it becomes about real people and real lives. We were already sucked into Katie’s personal world, but the stark reality of her situation is particularly visceral when the animation she stands in front of depicts the scene as she sees it, through her eyes, rather than from a distant perspective.
Katie’s story touches on myriad themes of our times - racism, zenophobia, inequality, unemployment, class, education and status, to name but a few. But this is not social commentary. All these things find mention because they exist in Katie’s world, and whilst they do affect the minute to minute action, and have influenced her psychological make up, the most moving moments of the play come when we witness her internal struggles to understand just who she is, where she fits, how she feels and what on earth she is supposed to do with those feelings.
There are plentiful moments of humour - the performance is funny, Katie is funny, her behaviour is funny, but it is also excruciatingly raw and painful and heartbreaking to watch. I left knowing I had seen something really good, something well done, but also something that gave me more than a lot to think about.
Wherever it pitches up, the audience can expect to be left with a range of emotions, including basic wonder at how one woman - girl - or at least a young woman doing a darn darn fine impression of a teenage girl, has the sheer energy to talk, and talk, and talk more, in a relentless diatribe, for more than an hour. At times I was willing her to take a breath, and relieved when she did, but it was never merely a functional act of drawing in the air to enable her to continue relaying a script. So observed is Jack Thorne’s writing and so knowing, Joe Murphy’s direction, that every inhalation, every puff, sigh, involuntary hiccup, forced laugh and self conscious giggle, served to bring almost painful realism to the character.
Rosie Wyatt, the actress narrating the story of a particularly troubling incident in her daily life, and at the same time allowing us an insight into the danger-fraught mental and emotional jungle that is her world, was entirely believable throughout. I doubt there was a person in the room who couldn’t relate in some way to Katie. You didn’t need to have ever been that troubled teen girl, or know the kind of characters she described, or have ever set foot in Luton, where the reported action takes place (in fact, in one of her many directed comments to the audience, she rightly conjectures that most of us probably never have!). We may not be able to empathise, but everyone in the room, from the school kids to the seasoned reviewers (ahem) would recognise Katie as that friend or school colleague, or just the girl in the group hanging out around the newsagent, playing at being the worldly wise woman, putting on the swagger and front that hides a bottomless pit of insecurities and self loathing.
The performance is captivating - so much so that I had to remind myself to take a look from time to time at the black and white pencil line animation being projected onto the white screen that fills the entire stage behind our narrator. It’s important, and someone has taken a lot of effort to make it pertinent to the story we are being told. When I did pay attention, particularly towards the end of the piece, I noticed how the picture is being slowly filled in stroke by stroke, mirroring the gradual fleshing out of Katie’s character as her tone of voice, mannerisms and the emphases of her comments reveal her secret self.
The drawings become more intimate in their subject too. We start with a tall wall and the top of an otherwise obscured building that’s immediately recognisable as a school. Then comes the street and the car - an important prop - shop fronts and a housing estate. We’re still in pretty generic territory, but as the story intensifies and Katie and the other members of the ‘crap gang’ in which she has inadvertently found herself move in on their prey, so the focus of the sketches also closes in. Now we are shown a house front, the bricks and curtains and roof tiles are drawn in, and then we’re taken inside, into a home. The story suddenly becomes so much more fraught with suspense and the lingering sense of impending dread heightens, as it becomes about real people and real lives. We were already sucked into Katie’s personal world, but the stark reality of her situation is particularly visceral when the animation she stands in front of depicts the scene as she sees it, through her eyes, rather than from a distant perspective.
Katie’s story touches on myriad themes of our times - racism, zenophobia, inequality, unemployment, class, education and status, to name but a few. But this is not social commentary. All these things find mention because they exist in Katie’s world, and whilst they do affect the minute to minute action, and have influenced her psychological make up, the most moving moments of the play come when we witness her internal struggles to understand just who she is, where she fits, how she feels and what on earth she is supposed to do with those feelings.
There are plentiful moments of humour - the performance is funny, Katie is funny, her behaviour is funny, but it is also excruciatingly raw and painful and heartbreaking to watch. I left knowing I had seen something really good, something well done, but also something that gave me more than a lot to think about.