Tanya Ronder has done a miraculous job of adapting DBC Pierre’s novel for the stage in a way that makes it unforgettable.

You can’t help but wonder when you watch this story of mixed up teenager Vernon Little, if the late J.D. Salinger might have created him instead of Holden Caulfield had he been writing now. Not that 15 year old Vernon is rebellious; at least not until his mother, a psychopath, his best friend, the media and his entire community force him to be by utterly ruining his life.

Things are bad enough for Vernon at the start of the play, when he survives a massacre at this school carried out by his best friend and is treated as an accessary to murder. Through the manipulation and stupidity of others, he is soon on the run wrongly accused of being a serial killer. He finds some kindnesses and companionship along the way.

Willem Wassenaar and Sophie Roberts have pulled off a blinder with this production, especially given they’ve created it in just four weeks at a summer school for young actors.

Vernon is a modern day Hamlet in some ways and that’s true also of the role on stage, so congratulations to Anthony Young for a remarkable achievement. He gives us vulnerability, confusion and clarity in equal measure.

Anna Harcourt is assured as Vernon’s self-obsessed mother, Vanessa Cullen plays the wildly ambitious and beautiful Taylor with gusto, and Richard Osborne is loathsome, as he should be, as Vernon’s nemesis, Lally.

Felix Borthwick’s cameo as the imprisoned “pastor” is one of the highlights of the show. The cast of 20, whether in big roles or small, is splendid and this is as good an example of true ensemble acting as you will see.

This kind of high octane production would test the skills and energy of seasoned performers. The production looks and sounds fantastic too thanks to Andrew Foster’s set, Glenn Ashworth’s lighting and Thomas Press’ sound.

Long Cloud Youth Theatre continues to produce some of the most thrilling work in the capital.
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There is a lot to love about the Long Cloud Youth Theatre company. Headed by Willem Wassenaar and Sophie Roberts, they are young, they are hungry and boy can they pull off a southern accent.

Long Cloud is a company geared towards the development of the bright, young hopes of the Wellington and New Zealand theatre scene. For the past two years or so, Long Cloud has been on a consistent upward trajectory, each production bettering their last (with the slight blip of their most recent show Titus). The actors, ranging in ages from 15 to 22, noticeably growing in skill and confidence with each show.

Each time they seem to peak and I am left coming away with the conclusion that they couldn’t possibly get any better than this. Vernon God Little, their latest work, once again proves me wrong. Once again, they have bettered themselves. 

With Vernon, Long Cloud takes a big step up into the hallowed cavern of Downstage. It would have been simplicity itself for them to shudder and fall under the increased weight of expectation that come with this more professional of environs. But they’re just too damn good to let it get to them. They fill that space as if they were born on it. Wassenaar and Robert’s direction takes many cues from the epic theatre and then delights in twisting them into many thoroughly modern and dashingly fresh ways.

Vernon God Little is an adaptation by Tanya Ronder of DBC Pierre’s Booker Prize Winning Novel of the same name. It tells the story of Vernon Gregory Little, a fifteen year old trapped very much in the most middle of America. His best friend, Jesus (not that one), has just perpetrated a school shooting leaving sixteen people dead. Including himself. With the child who did it dead, the public turn on Vernon in their search for someone to blame. Things then tend to get a little bit worse. And then a lot worse.

Vernon God Little is a play about all the conflicting emotions of youth. It is a play about the desperate need to express oneself and how totally that can be balanced by all means of pressures around you.

The only real criticisms of to be made are that at 165 minutes it is a mite too long with the ending feels just a shade drawn out. It also needs to be noticed that so much is made of the returning Long Cloud students and their undoubted talents, that it is easy to ignore the new arrivals (something made easy by their notable positioning in the smaller roles of the play). These new arrivals do as markedly wonderful a job as the old hats.

The set and costume designed by the endlessly multitalented Andrew Foster, find the garishness and tarnish of modern youth without ever being gaudy. Glenn Ashworth’s lighting is very good, with one lighting effect towards the end that totally blew my mind.

It is the cast’s commitment and energy, along with the wise words of the script modulated perfectly through Wassenaar and Roberts’ directorial voices that makes Vernon God Little the best show I’ve seen so far this year. 

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“If it were half as short, it would be twice as good,” said a friend after seeing Tanya Ronder’s adaptation of DBC Pierre’s Man Booker Prize-winning satirical novel about Vernon, an innocent young, white trash Texan, whose only friend has massacred sixteen of their schoolmates.

Played in a broad cartoon style that is becoming tedious from repetition (The 39 Steps and Sud are two recent examples), Vernon God Little takes nearly three hours to show us that from a teenager’s perspective the adult world sucks and is full of hypocrites, sexual perverts, corrupt and grotesque officials, and a manipulated media-obsessed public that ends up voting a la Big Brother which unpopular condemned prisoner is to be lethally injected.

The hick characters inhabiting the small town of Martirio and the Mexicans Vernon meets when he escapes to Acapulco are all highly predictable, though often funny, caricatures. The frantic picaresque narrative is convoluted with the odd plot reversal and unnecessarily long sequences, which may have been important, brilliantly written and funny in the novel (I haven’t read it) but become on stage excess weight such as the tiresome prison scene that made me long for the death penalty to be carried out.

The satire attacks pretty obvious and easy targets: the media, small-town America, the judicial system (particularly the death penalty for which Texas is notorious) as well as the desire for vengeance. Vernon has been described as Holden Caulfield on amphetamines, and he needs them in this dystopia.

The saving grace of the long evening is the exuberance and commitment of the 21 young actors from the Long Cloud Youth Theatre who play 56 roles. And in the lead and on stage throughout is Anthony Young, who plays Vernon, with a maturity, control and subtlety that is astonishing in one so young. In a way his air of perplexed innocence and his growing anger for his situation as well as his desire for revenge on his mother’s slimy boyfriend, are far too real and make the cartoonish, chaotic world he lives in belong to another planet. But that is not his fault, but the play’s. An outstanding performance.
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It would be comforting to write off DBC Pierre’s Man Booker Prize-winning satire, boldly adapted for the stage by Tanya Ronder, as a paranoid fantasy, especially given the drug abuse history of ‘Pierre’ (a nom-de-plume: DBC stands for Dirty But Clean). But ‘reality’ television proves how bizarre actual Americans can be, especially in the southern states, and as this story unfolds what initially seems far-fetched takes on an unnerving sense of authenticity.  

Trumpeted as the first production to bring a youthful cast (of 21) to the 51 roles (played by 9 adult actors in the original Young Vic production), Long Cloud Youth Theatre commit whole-heartedly to the high-energy caricaturing the script demands, lampooning their peers with the same glee as they send up the ‘olds’.

The inciting incident, powerfully evoked in Thomas Press’s excellent sound design, is a High School massacre. Vernon Gregory Little’s best friend, Jesus (pronounced in the Mexican fashion: Hjayzu) has shot 16 classmates and then himself. Aside from the stillness of Vernon centre-stage, nothing is scripted or enacted to register the enormity of this; we need to sense the vacuum this society abhors. Only once does Vernon express something like horror and grief when his Mom refers to two of the deceased as if they were still alive, and it has a strong, if brief, impact.

Anthony Young is superb in the title role, commanding our empathy as events unfold, twist and inexorably trap him in a web of scapegoating, deceit, self-interest, treachery and appallingly casual injustice.

We are seeing what happens through Vernon’s 16-17 year-old eyes, so he is the sane centre of a world that is crazy, corrupt and perverted: first manifested in the Sherriff and his deputy – grotesquely embodied by Jack Buchanan and Tai Berdinner-Blades – who come sniffing for someone they can bring to spectacular justice, since the prime perpetrator is inconveniently dead.

Not that Vernon is just a helpless victim of some bizarre conspiracy. There is something he is loath to mention, although his sassy Mom (Anna Harcourt) is somewhat obsessed with his “condition” when she is not trying to sell her “joy cakes” or preoccupied with her need for a new refrigerator. What seems like scatological humour at the time has an excellent pay-off.

It’s when super-plausible roving reporter Lally (Richard Osborne) arrives, that the power of the media – of the commercial networks’ hunger for news stories and the deep desire of the average American to appear on tv – injects the viral toxins for which there is no known cure. Lally’s desire to crack it with his own show becomes the prime driving force.

Sex and drugs take their toll as well, as well-known country and blues songs, usually sung live by the company (musical directors Jack Buchanan and Richard Osborne), punctuate and add flavour to the action.

Taylor (Vanessa Cullen) is the unattainable holy grail of supposed sex-appeal, and what turns out to turn her on is one of the more sobering insights the play has to offer. Meanwhile Vernon is harassed by the young and inquisitive Ella (Freya Sadgrove) until he makes a break for it over the boarder to Mexico, where the people are equally over the top but not as insidiously dangerous.

The remaining roles, cameos and recurring bit parts are vividly delineated by Joe Dekkers-Reihana, Ben Crawford, Felix Borthwick, Hayden Frost, Michael Boyes, Isabelle Stewart, Ingrid Saker, Michelle Ny, Tim Macdonald, Nathan Mudge, Corine Knorr, Betty Chung, Michael van Echten and Fran Olds. And everyone adopts the southern accent with remarkable ease.  

Their emphatic costumes are designed by Andrew Foster, whose simple but versatile setting – empanelled with Texan and Mexican place names and furnished with beer crates – is obtrusively lit by Glenn Ashworth, mostly from a low-slung grid that declares the theatricality of it all.

Under the challenging guidance of directors Willem Wassenaar and Sophie Roberts, the outrageous becomes more and more credible, and the high-energy performances gain a centeredness that compels us to see the outcome as real.

The death row sequence especially brings a stark, dark truth to proceedings, allowing for greater substance when an inmate called Lasalle (Borthwick) responds to Vernon’s need to face his God: “God? You think a caring intelligence would wipe out babies from hunger? Watch decent folk scream, burn and bleed every second of the night and day? That ain’t no God, that’s just people.” After railing at “the market for promises that needs us to need”, where “God gave his name to dollar bills and got out of town” (or words to that effect), Lasalle tells Vernon, “You are God.” Hence the title.

Meanwhile the media frenzy has escalated into a Survivor-style popular vote spectacular with networks competing for screening rights … The 21^st century equivalent of public executions in the town square. The more things change …

It’s a long but well-paced production, full of sound, fury and dark comedy that finally delivers the goods, not least with a well-crafted twist that ensures we don’t leave the theatre bereft of hope. While Vernon God Little has been validly described as the new generation’s Catcher in the Rye, its broad satirical theatricality also recalls Dario Fo.  

It is wonderful to have a highly trained youth theatre company playing at Downstage again. Long Cloud has become a vital energy source in Wellington’s vibrant theatre scene.
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