Our Generation
National Theatre (Dorfman)
 

TEENAGERS today are rarely given centre stage, their voices instead often confined to dubious online platforms or filtered through the complacent interpretations of dominant oldies. So it’s brilliant of the National Theatre to bring us the world of youth through the eyes of 12 teenagers in this massively researched and cleverly crafted verbatim offering.

And what a world! Unique characters shine from the stage in a deluge of energy, epitomising that time in our youth when we progress from childhood acceptance to the question of who we are and what we stand for.

Adult exclusion, shared obsessions, fragmented dreams and daily disappointments are all features of these ardent teenage years but what all the young have in common is the pressing need to  accommodate the casual and careless accident of birth that brings them where they are. It’s a major ask of anyone.

These young come from London and Birmingham, Belfast and Glasgow; some are impoverished, others in private school; there are talents and disabilities; some are Muslims, some Christians. There are jokers and social climbers, anxious and over-confident types, wanted and unwanted and those who are good or bad at maths.

But what lurks beyond the misty boundaries of their vivid existence is the adult world of fear and uncertainty, power and subjugation, war and pestilence, ambition and defeat: all a hazy threat to young lives naturally energised with present hope.

And it’s a wonderful team effort. The company of young actors excel with their warmth and humour and empathetic rapport.

Meanwhile, writer Alecky Blythe – with her extensive team of researchers (collectors), her dramaturgical support from Sebastian Born, and the kind of technical help only available at the National – produces a vast-ranging study that melts our hearts and recalls for all of us the blue remembered hills of adolescence.

For the creative team, the piece is a drama and a mission. For the audience, tirelessly watching scene after scene for little short of four hours, it becomes less a play and more a collage of snapshots, soundbites and emojis.

Fit for a tweeting generation this may be, but you can’t help feeling that the result is more fulfilling for the performers than for an audience whose empathy is spread too thin.

In true drama, we must share in individual jeopardy not just glimpse it fleetingly and in general.

The work ends rather predictably, in Covid lockdown and you wonder how the real young people who sold their souls for this project feel now. For, despite the lovely acting and terrific one-liners, they come out, not as treasured individuals, but rather as multiple cogs in a ceaselessly rolling wheel: the antithesis I would suggest of what they hankered after.

Lovely kids, though: sweet and heartwarming. Terrific authenticity. Passion and truth. And a timely focus on what it means to be young. Just not quite a play.

Until April 9 2022. Box Office: 020 3989 5455 www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/