The Court Theatre’s Youth Company offers emerging practitioners in their late teens and early twenties the opportunity to work with professionals to develop diverse performance skills, on stage and off. Earlier this year they explored a traditional text – Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – but for their final public showing of the year, Trios, the Company have developed original devised plays that feature two or three performers.

The scenes are presented in the Gloucester Room in the Isaac Theatre Royal; this space is well-supported technically but can be a bit of a dog in terms of visibility, but this is ameliorated through the use of cabaret-style seating that softens and opens up the space.  

For this event, the Company has worked under the tutelage of Holly Chappell-Eason and Tom Eason, the directors of Two Productions, which is currently enjoying a residency in the Christchurch Arts Centre. Two Productions does a lot of work in facilitating work in development, particularly devised work by emerging practitioners that explores the tangled, uncertain space between adolescence and adulthood – something done to great effect in their recent show for the Christchurch Arts Festival, Hell or High Water. The first two scenes of the evening reflect this focus.

In ‘The Neon Jungle’, Rosie Gilmore and Alex Wright, dressed in business-wear and wearing expressions that shift between corporate boredom and almost disgusted bafflement, investigate the properties of various props, trying to figure out pre-set rules, restrictions and expectations that have not been communicated to them. It’s a playful way to begin the evening, although marred a touch by issues with visibility when the performers are low to the ground.

The next piece, ‘PoP’ (Sam Bowler, Paris Thorner and Sam McKay), explores similar territory. Here the performers combine spoken word and stylised movement to more clearly articulate the fears, expectations and pressures, both internal and external, that shape our capacity to act (or not). My plus one, a secondary school teacher, is really taken with this youthful expression of voice; it expresses frustration and uncertainty in a manner that is open and vulnerable, and that highlights the power of individual voices.

‘Common Etiquette’ (Alice Cheersmith, Elizabeth Thomson and Miriam Qualls) offers us the perspective of three cutesy-pie 50s housewives, whose hopes and fears about their various marriages are broken up by moments of song, and eventually shattered by a realisation that they’ve all been victimised, and have perhaps been quite complicit in this. The American accents and vocal harmonies swim around a bit, but I enjoy the sense of style in this piece – especially the frocks. There’s a pointed barb in its tail, but I am left with a lot of questions, not least about its perspective on sexism and its perpetuation. 

Grace Newton, Jacob Banks and Patrick James’s piece, ‘Wanna Be Cool?’, is the story of a boozy, campground midnight hook up that is billed charmingly as “a coming of age story better than Romeo and Juliet”. Again, there is a sense of gentle uncertainty and expectation, as the characters both have a good time and seem to play act at what they think they should be doing to have a good time – a mixture of expression and mimicry that’s emphasised by the choice of ‘nostalgic’ New Zealand party hits, swappa crate bottles of beer and 90s fashion. It’s a high energy, upbeat way to finish the first half. 

Where other groups have played with stories that pit young adult optimism against grown up reality, ‘The Last Noel’ (Harrison Searancke, Craig Pope and Daniel Mathers) goes for a fast-moving, rapid-patter Christmas-themed noir pastiche. I find it to be very endearing. I appreciate the tongue-in-cheek nature of the characterisations and the way the trio use the limited space of the stage to create multiple scenarios, although there’s a fine balance that’s still to be found between maintaining the pell-mell momentum of the unravelling story and allowing the audience to keep up.

This text-heavy play is juxtaposed against Todd Anderson and Abbi Hope Thomas’s assured piece, ‘Toxic’. The two utilise physical and dance theatre to interrogate the manner in which relationships are both built up and scuppered by external and internal voices. I really appreciate that the performers are interested in letting the audience draw their own conclusions about the piece’s narrative arc and its emotional implications, especially in its anxious tension between intimacy and separation.

The evening ends, unexpectedly, with a series of guided activities, led by William Burns, that feel a little like a Crate Escape-type team building exercise that begins in the Gloucester Room and eventually guides us out of the theatre. On one hand, I really like that the nature of the presented pieces is being stretched out into something more experiential and interactive. It’s ambitious, I’ll certainly give it that, but it’s also very hard to wrangle this many people, and to ensure a consistency of storytelling. I am still trying to think through how successfully this final segment, and the narrative that is revealed at the end – another genre pastiche – works in conjunction with the rest of the showing; are we meant to take its story seriously?

I have a great fondness for the sort of playful, exploratory work that is presented by The Court Theatre’s Youth Company in Trios, especially when it’s so obviously been guided by the interests of the various performers. It’s uneven in parts, and some pieces are more polished than others, but who cares, really? It’s also gregarious and thoughtful, and I applaud the generosity of the Company and the technical staff who’ve supported them.

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