When an organisation dedicated to youth is old enough to publish its official
history, there could be concern about its ability to carry on. But there
need be no worries about the National Student Drama Festival. Founded in
1956 by the Sunday Times theatre critic Harold Hobson, and supported by this
paper ever since, the 51st festival showed no signs of decay.
Since 1990, it has been a spring fixture at Scarborough, a heady — sometimes
explosive — week of workshops, masterclasses, debates and, most important of
all, performances of home-grown productions that have been chosen from the
100 or more entered for competitive selection by the festival’s touring
team. This year, the programme was enhanced by invited dance productions
from partner student festivals in Holland and Spain, and a performance of
Peter Brook’s production of The Grand Inquisitor. Angela Pleasence, who
energised the festival with her acting workshops, and Brook’s star Bruce
Myers joined me as judges.
Rightly, the thousand or so festival-goers had their eyes on the future, not
the past. Here was tomorrow’s talent, today. Yet these young people view the
world they will inherit with scepticism, even anxiety. The most direct
political statements came from the youngest performers. Proving the festival
is not confined to university students, West Sussex County Youth Theatre and
John Cabot City Technology College, Bristol, sent big companies whose angry
energy sandblasted any roughness in technique.
Guided by the professional director Toby Wilsher, West Sussex CYT took its
educational prospects by the throat in his reworking of Gogol’s classic
satire on government bureaucracy as The Ofsted Inspector.
The grotesqueries of the Russian original were not lost in translation: set
in the common room of a failing comprehensive, the production took every
opportunity to send up the ticks and quirks of an exhausted staff. But this
was no end-of-term revue. There were serious points made about the
selling-off of playing fields, the tick-box curriculum and the narrowing of
educational horizons. This was a desperate plea that the bureaucrats should
let schools do what they are supposed to do: teach. Adam Barlow won a
commendation for his rounded performance as the corrupt headmaster, and
Gavin Fowler an award for his bravura display as the upper-class drone
mistaken for the school’s unwelcome government inspector. The joy of this
production, which won an award for the company’s comic ensemble, was how it
filled the in-the-round Stephen Joseph Theatre with music, masks, slapstick
and dance, to drive the message home.
John Cabot CTC’s Asbo had a more despairing take on the
futures that face the young condemned to living death on a sink estate. The
audience had to run the gauntlet of menacing hoodies, sneering young girls
and blinding police torches before it could even begin to address the story
of Dante, played with convincing nastiness by Dan Srokosz, and his
dysfunctional family.
As writer and director, teacher Jane Williams wanted to make a passionate
protest against the authorities’ use of anti- social behaviour orders
against young people like Dante, when they do so little to address the
underlying issues of isolation and alienation, or to support the youth
services that have to cope with the consequences. This didacticism sat
uneasily within the conventions of a semi-musical whose ballads hardly
reflected the culture of the young actors. Ironically, their energy and
commitment seemed trapped by the adult values imposed. Asbo does not pretend
all young people are heroes, but it does not empower them to portray them
largely as victims.
Whether victims or potential victors, the world they inherit is of their
elders’ making. That responsibility was powerfully underlined in Al Smith’s
intelligent Enola, written and directed for the University
of Edinburgh’s Kandinsky company. Imaginatively mixing fact and fiction,
science and art, Smith questions the morality of the atomic bomb by
exploring the responsibilities of the scientists who created it, and the
ordinary mortals who built the aircraft that delivered it. Smith won the
Sunday Times Playwriting Award, and Ellie Bruce a judges’ commendation for
her performance as Enola Gay, a daughter forever labelled by sharing her
name with the plane that carried that world-shattering bomb.
Nihilistic violence is an unthinking response to the official violence the
young face, and violence was on display in both raw and sophisticated form.
John Dwyer’s Making Ugly, for the University of
Huddersfield, upset many with the sexual brutality portrayed in the making
of a snuff movie, but the cast lacked the skills to show its satirical
intentions. William Bowry’s revival of Gregory Burke’s Gagarin
Way for the University of York showed how it could be done.
Although the festival has no bias against established contemporary writers —
and has a desire to see the classics — Burke’s was the only previously
performed text to make it through this year’s selection process. First
performed in 2001, this locked-room drama provided wonderful parts,
admirably taken by Tom Hunt as a Sartre-citing psychopath and Nick Payne as
a hostage who seems to welcome his own death.
The bloody climax of Gagarin Way, when a lust for sheer terror supplants any
political justification of terrorism, challenges how we handle violence and
pain. This was perfectly expressed in Tom Dalton Bidwell’s award-winning
miniature Risky and Fluke, a 15-minute drama inspired by
Buster Keaton. As writer and principal performer, Bidwell subverted the
comfortable idea of a vaudeville double act to explore the violence and
humiliations of comedy, before exacting an oppressed fall-guy’s revenge.
This was just one way in which we witnessed the struggle to deal with grief
and obsession. A ghostly replay of themes from Melville’s Moby Dick supplied
the disjointed material for Leviathan, by Dartington’s
Solvents Theatre Company. Klaus Kruse won the Directors’ Guild Award for
leading the creation of a poetic event of visual and aural beauty that
enlisted the audience as participants — and subjected them to some of the
deprivations experienced by Ahab’s crew. The aesthetic of grief was further
explored in Hospitals and Other Buildings That Catch Fire,
from London University’s Royal Holloway College, a production whose
imagistic, nonlinear form bore all the scars of a devised piece, but shaped
by its writer and director, Phil King. The image of Nicola Chalmers trying
to drown herself, her grief, or possibly her damaged baby in a bowl of water
was one of the most affecting the Festival saw.
(The Otherwise) Defunct Red Cloth, from the University of
Winchester, credits no writer or director, simply listing as “collaborators”
six women who explored the meaning of the death of loved ones through the
contrast between the high rituals of art and the mawkish banalities of
social custom. Undoubtedly influenced by the dance theatre of Pina Bausch,
the company showed a similar concern for the visual impact of movement and
design, but added the authority of their own emotional experience. The
company won awards for its visual impact and sense of tragic ensemble, while
Angela Coventry won an individual acting award for her account of her
father’s death.
With so many tears, comedy was a welcome consolation. Dartington’s Solvents
Theatre Company surprised us by following the solemnities of Leviathan with
a hilarious expressionist cabaret, The Cosmic Family Workshop-Seminar,
which sent up the hucksterism of evangelical religion and personal makeover
shows, and won the company an award for its versatility.
There was a similar playfulness in The Romeo and Juliet Syndrome
from the University of Leeds, a game show, a comedy and a touching
celebration of the power of love, as the frisky ladies of the Heartbreak
Clinic healed the star-crossed lovers whose lives were skilfully interwoven
with Shakespeare’s tragedy. The lightness of touch shown by Emily Westwood
as writer and director won her the prestigious Buzz Goodbody Student
Director Award. The title of the National Student Drama Festival’s official
history is Raw Talent (Oberon Books). Here was talent indeed, in a neatly
served soufflé.
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The 2006 NSDF awards go to ...
Buzz Goodbody Student Director Award: Emily Westwood (University of Leeds)
Sunday Times Playwriting Award: Al Smith (University of Edinburgh)
Sunday Times Harold Hobson Student Drama Critic Award: Van Banham (University
of Wollongong, Australia)
Theatre Record Young Critic’s Award: Tamzin Aitken (LAMDA)
International Student Playscript Competition: Van Banham (University of
Wollongong, Australia)
Directors’ Guild Award: Klaus Kruse (Dartington College of Arts)
JUDGES’ AWARDS
For comic ensemble: West Sussex County Youth Theatre
For tragic ensemble: Symphony of Dirt and Dreams Theatre Company (University
of Winchester)
For versatility: The Solvents Theatre Company (Dartington College of Arts)
For set and costume: Symphony of Dirt and Dreams Theatre Company (University
of Winchester)
For acting: Gavin Fowler (West Sussex County Youth Theatre)
Tom Dalton Bidwell (University of East Anglia)
Angela Coventry (University of Winchester)
JUDGES’ COMMENDATIONS:
For acting: Adam Barlow (West Sussex County Youth Theatre)
Ellie Bruce (University of Edinburgh)
For soundscape: The Solvents Theatre Company (Dartington College of Arts)
STAGE ELECTRICS AWARDS
For lighting: Matthew Thompson (Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh)
For sound: Alexander MacMillan (University of Edinburgh)
For technical achievement: Adam Flynn (University of Surrey)
