THEATRE and youth culture seem, these days, to be increasingly at odds. Theatre needs time and concentration. Though it can be tricked out with all sorts of spectacle, it depends inescapably on very bare necessities - space, time, human presence. It is no good at grabbing the attention quickly. An audience is usually required to put up with a period of uncertainty during which not merely the characters and the situation but the very conventions of the piece, have to be learned. It is, in an age of instant replays, unrepeatable: you get it first time or not at all. In an MTV world of instant excitement and immediate boredom, of short attention spans and rapid eye movements, it can seem like a doomed anachronism.
The admirable thing about the National Youth Theatre's production of Antoine O Flatharta's specially commissioned Strawberries in December, which ended its run at the Peacock on Saturday night, is that it never pretended otherwise. It would have been very easy for NYT, in its first production since 1989, to put on a nice Shakespeare or a modern classic, pretend that all was right with the future of theatre and accept a ritual pat on the head from its elders.
But NYT doesn't need to be patronised. The number of youth theatres has grown phenomenally, from three in 1986 to more than 50 now. The youth theatre movement has fed indirectly into the work of Gerard Stembridge and Paul Mercier. Brian Brady, who directed Strawberries in December, is himself a product of youth theatre. Both as an end in itself and as a long term resource for Irish theatre as a whole, the movement has no need to justify itself.
It deserves great credit, therefore, for not taking the soft option of pretending that theatre has a natural and stable place in the hearts and minds of young people now. Instead, it had the courage to produce a piece as angular and hyperactive as contemporary culture itself. If the result was very far from being a well made play, it was something much more honest and adventurous.
Strawberries in December could be seen in one sense as a play that asked fundamental questions about its own existence. Instead of making blithe assumptions, it implicitly asked whether "youth theatre" - is not in itself a contradiction in terms: is it possible to be at one and the same time true to the cultural experiences of young people now and to operate within the conventions of theatrical form? It matters much less that the answers it suggested were equivocal than that they were asked in the first place.
Antoine O Flatharta's work has always been concerned with the tension between a hankering after stability on the one hand and the placeless and amorphous feel of the contemporary technological village on the other. Television and film, karaoke and computers, saturate his landscapes, unsettling identities and undermining language itself. Strawberries in December, though set in a supermarket, was also dominated by disembodied technologies - irradiated fruit, mobile phones, tapes, late night radio confessionals, coded electronic security devices. On Feargal Doyle's excellent set, the supermarket shelves were deliberately reminiscent of a bank of television monitors. In the story played out around it, the real and unreal were virtually indistinguishable. The young woman market testing margarine was hardly more grounded in reality than the young man obsessed with messages from aliens.
THE piece went further than O Flatharta has gone before, though, bringing a sense of disconnection right into the heart of the play itself. The nod in the direction of plot and character, a thin storyline about a young woman returning from Spain to manage her dead father's supermarket, was more like a barely perceptible tic. The play was at its weakest, indeed, when it tried to keep up the pretence of a conventional storyline, suggesting motives for the actions of characters who hardly existed as, such.
For the most part, the laws of cause and effect were discarded in favour of a jerky jumble of appearances in which neither time nor place could hold good, and no fewer than 26 characters moved in an out of view. The play worked off the idea of layers of reality - the ghosts of the past, the confusions; of the present, the desires of the future - co existing. The effect was as enervating, but also sometimes as mesmerising, as a 90 minute, non stop session of channel hopping with the remote control, snatched sounds and fragmented visions succeeding each other in an almost random order.
It is hardly surprising that this did not produce a theatrical classic. But it is hardly very important either. With Brian Brady's disciplined direction and O Flatharta's ability to create powerfully expressive moments, a sense of theatrical form did emerge from the relentless flow of barely connected images. Brady imposed a visual coherence, culminating in a striking tableau of candlelit faces stacked on the shelves, and managed to move 26 actors into and out of a small space without ever succumbing to chaos. And O Flatharta allowed a simple yearning for wholeness to emerge unsentimentally from all the excess of images. What more should be asked from a National Youth Theatre than evidence that the theatrical desire to give a shape to formless existences remains alive?
