The 49th Sunday Times National Student Drama Festival, at Scarborough, hit the
beach, took to the streets and lit up the town as one thousand students,
teachers, actors, directors, writers and technicians came together for an
intensive week of performances, workshops, discussions and partying. The
beach was used for an open-air performance of Waves, a striking dance duet
from Dartington exploring the boundaries between theatre and dance, the
streets were used for practical exercises from the street-theatre workshop,
and the town buzzed as festival-goers hurried between a dozen different
performance spaces.
Yet at the heart of this energetic celebration of the theatrical talent in our
schools, youth groups, colleges and universities, there was a grim
seriousness: so many of the productions presented in Scarborough were
concerned with death, destruction and the menace of the modern world. Even
the one classic, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (University of Hull), seemed
to have been chosen because its rape, mutilation and murder struck a
contemporary chord. The reason is not hard to find. It is there in the title
of the Presnyakov brothers’ Terrorism, given a choric, stylised production
by the Birmingham Theatre School. The distinctly Russian absurdity of the
piece was drowned out by the extensive use of newsreel footage, culminating
in a questionable shot of the Twin Towers, but there is no doubt 9/11 has
become a defining date in young people’s consciousness.
Violence and fear are everywhere, claims the Birmingham production, a point
put more subtly in Belfast’s Queen’s University’s presentation of The
Laramie Project, an American drama-documentary about the torture and murder
by two youths of a gay student in Laramie, Wyoming. The company is well
aware of the hate crimes on its doorstep, but the eight performers found a
cooling, framing distance from their own troubles in the work of bringing 60
Laramie characters to life, building up a moving picture of a community that
is shocked into self-questioning. “We don’t grow children like that here,”
claimed some Laramie residents, but the production, informed by its origins,
showed that they did, and that violence is a communal responsibility. The
company was commended for its ensemble-playing, and its director, Des
Kennedy, won the accolade of a training residency at London’s Bush theatre.
The festival judges — actress Patricia Kerrigan, Professor David Williams of
Dartington College and me — were also delighted to commend the
ensemble-playing of the four-girl cast from Reigate Grammar School, led by
their director, Fiona Clift, in their take on Steven Berkoff’s Greek.
Berkoff’s reworking of the Oedipus tale of incest, murder and plague was
itself reworked in Clift’s production, which won the Buzz Goodbody Student
Director Award. It reclaimed the piece’s misogyny with some voluptuous,
proud female acting.
Sexuality, indeed, seemed to cause less anxiety than world events. The
Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts’s revival of Jon-athan Harvey’s
Beautiful Thing was popular with festival-goers, who seemed unaware what a
breakthrough this celebration of adolescent homosexual love had been for gay
culture when first staged in 1993. They warmed to the West End values and
soap-opera setting brought to the piece, but the true value of the
production lay in the award-winning performances of Paul Stocker and Kevin
Kemp as two boys tentatively discovering sex.
Comedy is rare at the festival, and original comic writing even less common.
This was a bad year for new student writing in general, but Tiffany Wood and
Charlotte Riley’s Shaking Cecilia saved the day, winning the Sunday Times
Playwriting Award. Both writing and performing, the pair — possibly the next
French and Saunders — gave us a hilarious road-comedy that made skilful use
of video projection to create scenes and characters that had the actors
performing with their videoed images. Television beckons, but what gave the
comedy an edge was a twist of pathos that showed a psychological truth.
Goldsmiths College’s The Hamster Theme Park might have a jokey title, but it
was closer to Titus Andronicus, with a bleak vision of isolated, alienated
individuals trapped in obsessive cycles of behaviour. So isolated, in fact,
that the piece’s fragmented, cinematic form almost fell apart.
It is becoming clear that today’s students often find the collective practice
of devising their own work preferable to tackling an established script.
There is a more equal distribution of parts for our crowded classrooms, for
a start, but in a world where the centre no longer seems to hold, it can be
easier to create one’s own. Devised work is also a means to innovate, to
create with light and sound, to experiment with the relationship between
actors and audience. The 20-strong cast of Leicester College’s Dinner
offered us precisely that, with audience members seated alternately between
the black-tied or ball-gowned performers at a vast dinner table. No food was
served, but we were entertained to a half-hour enactment of the rituals and
terrors of formal occasions, with anarchy never far below the tablecloth.
Unlucky For Some, by Hull University’s Scarborough School of Arts, exchanged
the open vistas of the dinner table for the closed confines of the peep-show
box. The audience was limited to 13 and was confronted by 13 boxes. The
number on each seat determined which of three boxes each person would enter
during the performance, and only by comparing notes afterwards would it be
possible to know what all the boxes concealed. Each contained an actor, or
actors, phobic or fetishist figures who engaged or insulted us by turns,
challenging us to respond, and even to take part in the individual
psychodramas. It was weird, disturbing and well worth a commendation for
theatrical innovation.
Sometimes a devised piece will spring from an acting exercise. Such was the
case with murmer, from the BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology.
The directors, Marcus Condron and Kate Pringle, had taken part in a workshop
on silence at last year’s festival, and from it came an exploration of the
dreadful silence that immediately follows a car crash. Death, and loss,
again, but the dozen young performers created moments of love and tenderness
that transcended the pain of the subject matter, winning awards for both
their ensemble-playing and for direction.
Love and loss, albeit of a different kind, was also the theme of Hull
University’s Tapped, a piece devised by the company during 10 days spent in
a Hull bathroom. In a beautifully evoked starlit nowhere, two lovers lie in
a bath (with polystyrene granules cleverly substituted for water). The bath
is both a bower and a prison, for as they bare their bodies and their souls
to each other, they discover that intimacy can fail and proximity can be a
trap. The performers, Ed Cobbold and Sophie Dixon, won an acting
commendation, and the company as a whole an award for devised work.
Apart from the practical difficulties of presentation that some devised
theatre creates, the approach can be an excuse for avoiding the challenges
of prescribed characters and text. Freed from the obligations of narrative,
interpretation can be causally left to the audience’s imagination, and
individuals can lose their creative responsibility in the lowest common
denominator of the collective. But when sound, light, music, text and mise
en scène are all as carefully crafted as in Tapped, the process is truly
creative.
As was the case with As If a Rag, from Peterborough Regional College, which
won awards for its director, Rhys McClelland, and for innovation. Here, the
festival’s political obsession with a seemingly doomed world found a
powerful aesthetic form. Huddled around a covered pit, the audience seemed
to be watching over a grave, but when the cover splits and two
chemical-suited soldiers emerge, their torches reveal we are in a tomb and
they are the last survivors in a post-apocalyptic world. Against a
soundscape that evokes a lost, pastoral time, the pair attempt to comprehend
their situation by drawing mad political maps and make us complicit by
giving us their torches to illuminate the scene. They offer broken watches
as gifts, tie a ribbon between audience member and actor, but in the end, by
removing the filters in their gas masks, they cross the barrier of death.
Concerned, creative, this year’s festival even had the energy to embark on a
new policy of inviting foreign work, outside the competition. From
Amsterdam’s Dansacademie Arnhem came Yoram Mosenzon’s solo performance
piece, Political Assassinator, whose international perspective on power and
masculinity chimed perfectly with the festival’s spontaneous theme. Thanks
to the Arts Council, the festival is now in a position to start sending work
abroad.
Death may have been very present this year, but as the festival prepares for
its 50th birthday, it shows no sign of dying.
The National Student Drama Festival is supported by The Sunday Times, the
Noel Coward Foundation, the Mackintosh Foundation, the Calouste Gulbenkian
Foundation, the Esmée Fairburn Foundation and Scarborough borough council
