THE National Theatre's new season of plays for young people running at the Peacock until the middle of next month under the banner "Unplugged Lives" is the most tangible product so far of the Abbey's stated determination to move beyond its traditional audience.
It aims to demonstrate, in the words of Kathy McArdle, director of the Abbey Outreach Programme, "a renewed commitment to staging material that can compete for the affections of young people and that recognises the distinctive ways in which young people experience and see the world". And it promises to make theatre for young people "in ways that are consultative, participative and dangerous".
Since theatre is always participative - unlike some other forms, it does not exist without its audience - and should always try be dangerous, the word that leaps out here is "consultative". It is an odd word to associate with the creation of any work of art. The whole idea of consultation is tied up with notions of consensus, of balance, of telling people what they want to hear, of making sure every possible concern is given due regard. Art, on the other hand, is "dangerous" because it is, above all, about taking people where they have never been before. It is a journey into the unknown. Consulting people about what they would like to see in a piece of theatre is like asking people about to embark on a magical mystery tour where they want to go.
The first play in the season, John McArdle's Something's In The Way, which runs at the Peacock until November 23rd, puts the idea to the test. It is, we are told, a product of the "belief that it is important to find new ways of consulting young people in any attempt to create theatre which will mean something to them". It grew out of a week of workshops involving Navan Youth Group, the Dry Rain Youth Theatre from Bray, and Bonnybrook Youth Project from Coolock. These workshops explored "the core question of the play: Why might a young person kill themselves?"
We are not told however, who decided on this extraordinary question, whose full import can be easily understood by substituting a woman or a Northsider or a member of Boyzone" for "a young person". Who thought that suicide, rather than - say - sex, class, nationalism, poverty, emigration, the environment or education is the key issue for young people? Who decided that youth itself was to be defined in advance as a pathological, indeed potentially terminal, condition? Who made the assumption that theatre for young people should function as a kind of open therapy session where a grim, humourless baring of young souls could take place in public?
The central characters of Something's In The Way are Deirdre, an 18 year old girl contemplating suicide and Kurt, a 16 year old boy who announces near the beginning: "Me father's dead. That's why I'm celebrating". With them are Kurt's little sister Arianna, and an archetypal mother, and father.
Over an hour and a half, they play out a series of family confrontations, all of which bear an unfortunate resemblance to the kind of improvisations that might be expected in a role play therapy session. These are put together in a manner that manages the considerable feat of being both mechanical and chaotic.
The resulting mixture of sententiousness and psycho babble produces profundities of the order of: "There's no difference between killing someone and really killing, them." It reaches its most profound depths, however, in the following, not untypical, exchange:
Kurt: "Ma, I want you to come out to me."
Mother: "I can't son, I'm healing the wounds you left on your father.
To the question of how a writer like John McArdle, who has in the past written lucid and subtle plays for young people, such as Jacko and Two Houses, could create such dialogue, the answer can be no more certain. But it may well be found in a fundamental confusion between process and product. A process of "consultation" and workshops exploring psychological back alleys may be worthwhile in itself, but for an audience - young or old - it is irrelevant unless it results in an acceptable play. This process resulted in something the National Theatre would not ordinarily have staged.
SUCH of the dramatic incoherence of the piece is related also to assumptions about the place of theatre in youth culture. The assumption made here is that the job of theatre for young people is to "celebrate" youth culture, to "create for young people a theatre which is ... as immediate to them as the latest Smashing Pumpkins or Kula Shaker CD." In pursuit of this aim, director Kathy McArdle structures the piece around a succession of very loud blasts of rock music, accompanied by Paul Noble's aggressive, rave style lighting. She seems to interpret immediacy as implying a frantic, enervated style in which notions like concentration, precision and grace have no discernible place.
The fact is, the three minute culture of MTV videos is and always will be in conflict with the aesthetic of theatre. If theatre for young people doesn't deal with this reality, young people will conclude, quite rightly, that rather than sit through a failed attempt to reproduce the excitement of a Smashing Pumpkins CD in a completely different art form, they would be better off with the real thing.
