Young Writers Programme : Rampage ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

Bright lights in a savage urban jungle

The all-too-brief Rampage season asked writers between 13 and 25, “What makes you angry?”, and the answer has come back like a fist in the face. Teenage motherhood, gangsterism, drug-dealing, routine domestic violence and bloody death are all making headlines with disturbing frequency – and this rough and raw collection of plays makes every single synapse tingle with its devastating portrayal of such issues in an increasingly savage urban jungle.

Chloe Moss’s snappy X-tra kick starts the evening in a playground where a little light drug-dealing and some flirtatious truancy is peppered with such observations as, “It makes you chuck anyway, drinking Stella on a roundabout”. Arzhang Pezhman’s Come Around is less coherent, but, lie X-tra, shows both boys and girls beating each other up over relationship disputes, and intriguingly makes it clear that watching the news is irrelevant – even in the run up to war – when hormones and adolescent pride are there to be satisfied.

Last night, young people in a simmering audience were evidently both amused and enthralled by their peers’ on-stage efforts, and kept the atmosphere electric by alternately cheering or jeering the characters. When, in a joint work called Escobar Estate, a young mother protested that her crack-dealing boyfriend had merely told her that he “does a little weed from time to time, but works for London Transport”, the atmosphere was raucous – yet when the same character confided to a fellow young mother, “F**k men full stop”, several 16-year-old girls in front of me whispered in heartfelt tones, “I agree.”

The final play, John Donnelly’s There, announces a blackly comic Quentin Tarantino-style voice for modern theatre: a discussion that literally makes blood and organs fly could be edited, but is hilarious. It seems that young Britain has never had to be tougher in this essential and compelling evening.

Evening Standard 13 March 2003

by Rachel Halliburton