Seventeen (March 6, Young Vic)

This was a sort-of interesting conceit that got increasingly purposeless as it played out. The play's characters were all suburban teenagers, but played by actors in their 50s. This produced occasional moments of insight, particularly in the early parts of the play, as the actors said extraordinarily heedless, youthful things, playing into the conceit of the thing and seeming a bit disjointed. Then more mature expressions, often regarding the banal matters of everyday life, would, when said by older actors, suddenly sort of snap the characters out of seeming youthful. This was in its way an interesting effect: a reader more interested than I could no doubt do something with the play's multiple languages, showing how the older cast revealed how the language of youth is shot through with the language of age.

And that's about it, upside-wise. I don't know that this succeeds in any sense as a play about teenagers: I don't know if young people talk like this, or (particularly) if they schedule all of the meaningful events of their lives to happen in one evening. And I don't know that having older actors playing young people consistently demonstrated any interest: it felt like the production sort of settled down in its second half, and interesting things stopped getting passed across the different layers of the conceit. Ultimately this felt a bit like a technical exercise: the actors--consistently committed to "youth," at least as it involves running about the stage--stopped having anything non-cliched to do. And the generic "youth" of the characters prevented them from having any particular idiosyncrasies. This is youth as adulthood imagines it: popular music, difficult parents, going off to university or not, having crushes. None of these young people had any interests beyond this; the play as such failed a sort of generational Bechdel test, with no-one involved doing anything beyond being generic types. I think that with younger actors this would have been quite dull; but I'm not sure the against-type casting, age-wise, produced enough of anything to warrant this production.