After watching all three Young and Hungry plays this year, there is no question that the future of the industry is mostly in good hands. Every year, the Young and Hungry Festival of New Works gives young performers, designers, writers and even stage managers the opportunity to work in the capacity of a professional theatre. The festival is a great initiative and is an important one for the theatre industry. That said, the shows are often hit and miss. This year’s Young and Hungry has given us two great plays and one which just didn’t quite cut the mustard.

The evening’s second show Swan Song, by the illustrious Branwen Millar, was a creative and often surreal exploration of a dead girl’s memories and the future she had lost. Brendan Goudswaard and Anita Rossbach’s rich costuming aided director Willem Wassenaar’s heightened performance style, both of which were bright, colourful and a total pleasure to look at. The cast of 11 were confident and worked very well as a single unit, a testimony to Wassenaar’s able directing skills. While some found the play’s plot a trifle confusing, for me it was simply a case of working to engage with the show. Audiences these days can be so lazy!

RPM was the evening’s last offering, written by Dave Armstrong and directed by Leo Gene Peters. The play is about six young people burning through the streets of Wellington on a Friday night. Peters has done a fine job at keeping the show credible. Poorlyexecuted car scenes are, for me, one of the banes of theatre, however Peters’ cast handle their floating steering-wheels very naturally and the location changes are easy to follow. The cast strike a superb mixture of tragedy and humour and we laughed and cried with them right to the last.

While Swan Song and RPM were finely-wrought and polished, the night’s first show, Yolk, was lacking. This was no fault of the performers, who held the show together very nicely. The show suffered mainly from cumbersome design elements and some clumsy direction. There was a noticeable amount of dead time and a few awkard pieces of props and set. Why reconfigure and shift the centre set-piece for one scene, and then move it back again? However, as the themes of the play began to consolidate in the latter part of the show I did enjoy it much more, and all of the cast members should be commended for their willingness to unashamedly tackle some very mature and nerve-wracking themes.

But ultimately, it doesn’t really matter if the shows are good or bad. What’s important about Young and Hungry is that fresh faces are given a taste for blood. No, wait, I meant a taste of the professional theatre circuit – and that the circuit is given a taste of them too.

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Fantastically awkward | Disconcertingly abstract | Strong action and drama
By Maaike Olsthoorn
Wellington Home School

Yolk seemed a little bit flat, but got to be fantastically awkward towards the end. Some of the acting was a little squishy, but Elliot (Ailua Tagiilima) was a strong and carrying presence. Although the play had its strong points (Here, don’t forget your banana!) there were a number of counterfeit moments. Benji’s t-shirt was both awesome and appalling, simultaneously.

The lighting and sound elements were not glaringly obvious – nothing really wrong with them, but they weren’t amazing, either. I do now know what it was that decided that Flip should wear her mother’s Munroe wig for the larger part of the play.

Swan Song came highly recommended and perhaps for that reason was slightly disappointing. It was slightly, disconcertingly, abstract – enough to be a little confusing. That said it was highly, elegantly stylized, and fairly cohesive once you got a hold of said style and flow – the parting note was effectively down to earth in comparison with the rest of the production.

Strong, vibrant characters (occasionally a little loud and obnoxious) and fairly plain if effective use of music and lighting were utilized around strong, active staging, including a brief but brilliant song and dance sequence.

RPM opened with a lot of bored looking teenagers, some of them clutching steering wheels, but moved at speed from the moment two of those teenagers picked up their steering wheels and ran around the room yelling "broom broom" over the music.

On occasion the actors didn’t pause to let the crowd finish cracking up before continuing their lines, and as such a few pieces of dialogue were lost. However, there was a strong sense of action and drama. The end dragged on just a little bit too long, but the spinning hubcaps more than made up for it.
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Teenage Stereotypes
By David Edmonds
Tawa College

Combining the usual teenage stereotypes, plays Yolk and Swan Song comprise two of this year’s Young and Hungry: Festival of New Works. Alongside, they seem to meld seamlessly together with the clichéd stories of teenage angst, alienation and identity. Yet, somehow each one is definitive within itself, something rather surprising when characters are played by your peers.

Yolk was the lesser of the two, yet ever slightly. The topic of the moment, cervical cancer was explored and the effect it has on the central character Flip (played aptly by Jennifer Drake), a seemingly confused character whose mother’s illness changes the world around her. Around her, a circle of friends comprising of the stereotype and perhaps new archetype.

The stereotypes, the abysmally dull Benji, and double standard Michelle who despite being a poorly crafted character deserves kudos for the actress who somehow manages to add a dimension to her. The flamboyant fa’afafine Elliot should become the archetype of this unrepresented minority. The dialogue of this character was impeccably written and a great sense of vulnerability and strength was to be found.

Yolk, however suffers from its stereotypes, becoming clichéd and predictable. The audience is put off by the sex scene between Flip and Benji, simply because it was so overblown and predictable, even Shortland Street does intimacy better than the forced mess much of the supposedly ’emotional’ scenes in this play become.

Swan Song another mixed bag, some superb performances yet the script went deliberately out of its way to try and be creative, resulting in an utter shambles at times. Humour could be derived from the fact that the majority of the characters had no level of emotional depth or dimension yet were just overblown caricatures of existing stereotypes.

Considering this, the actors/actresses portraying Theresa, Veronica and Maddie have to be commended for delivering faultless performances. Strong comedic brilliance, understated irony yet the fact they played stereotypical characters with a subtle innocence made for riveting viewing.

However the rest of the play was far from enjoyable, the stage play was overtly ‘contemporary’ and felt like an awful attempt at avant-garde theatre. The scenarios were dull, the death scene almost hilarious with its deadpan emotion and lack of anything resembling dimension.

It almost seems that the teenage stereotypes have prevented these playwrights from presenting quality work. The acting was great in most cases, yet the plots and dialogue was almost too ‘deliberate’ for its own good. 

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The 2008 Young and Hungry Festival trio of new plays all have darkness in the form of death at their hearts. But that is not to say they are depressing affairs – on opening night laughter was the predominant audience response. As usual, the young performers involved in each professionally mentored show put a huge amount of energy and enthusiasm into the works, despite their varying quality. It’s a worthwhile endeavour and BATS and the Young and Hungry Board and mentors should be commended for keeping the spirit alive during times of increasingly straightened arts funding.

The most criticisms are usually directed at the script writing process – it is claimed that all the playwrights are supported and mentored and the plays themselves fully workshopped. However, it seems to be an unfortunate feature of Young and Hungry that one play always turns out to be under baked. This year that unfortunate role seems to be occupied by Arthur Meek’s Yolk. Despite having an interesting premise at its centre – a teenager coping with the early death of her Mother by hoping to become a young mother – the play doesn’t meet its potential. This is not aided by uninspired direction that lacks pace in particular. The reveals come a little too slowly for a sub-60 minute play and it begins to feel like less of a script and more like a series of slogans. This is a shame as the cast cope well with their difficult and under-developed characters, especially Jennifer Drake as central character Flip. Most laughs were generated by the camp commentary (which was not in the script I suspect) provided by Fip’s gay best friend Elliot (Ailua Tagiilima). It felt like a lot of talent was going to waste here – but maybe that is part of the point of Young and Hungry – trying and sometimes failing. It just seems a shame that those who are amateurs are let down by those who are supposed to be providing professional guidance and/or material.

Fortunately, the other two plays, Swan Song by Branwen Millar and RPM by Dave Armstrong are far more rounded scripts. Swan Song begins with the murder of a 16-year-old schoolgirl, Ashley/Ashly, and then splits in time going forward and backwards. Ashley (played by Beatrice Joblin) reviews the events of her life, aided by her childhood imaginary friend Theresa (Stella Reid). Ashly (Katie Montgomerie) moves forward in time, living the life she might have had. Ashley was a mediocre girl by her own assessment, and despite her attempt to view the past in a more interesting light she can’t change anything – only gain insight. But given that she has no ‘real’ future this insight is largely useless. Ashly, in her entirely imaginary future life has no limits to what she can do, but finds it to be a hollow existence. As Theresa explains – the problem with being imaginary is that once you’re forgotten you cease to exist. Willem Wassenaar has brought his distinctive style to this play with success – Ashley and Ashly are played relatively ‘straight’ but surrounded by a host of surreal characters. Bright colours and energy abound in the design and the play doesn’t suffer from the lack of pitch that some of the others do. This is by far the most enjoyable of the three shows, partly because Millar resists the urge to dogmatically set out her message and Wassenaar has brought out the best in his talented cast.

The final play of the evening takes on the teen boy (and girl) racer culture which has been much vilified of late. Dave Armstrong resists the urge to defend, but instead offers us characters who are accessible and seem to have solid reasons for their passion for cars and driving beyond the speed limit – mostly unhappy relationships with their families. They all want to fit and throw off their stereotypes. Another central theme is the romantic relationships starting and stalling between the characters – although several of them get involved in slightly implausible ways. The play loosely follows Justine, a girl racer from the Hutt and people associated with her – her boyfriend, Luke; his mechanic mate, Phil; the younger private school girl, Vanessa, that she has been forced to hang out with for a night and her boyfriend of sorts, and her fellow girl racer and staunch friend Rose. Events take place over a night during which relationships change and a life is destroyed. Armstrong has produced a sharply observed piece, with lines like “Did Mrs Milf have a grunty sub-box” getting good laughs. Leo Gene Peters has worked well with a script that requires many things the size of BATS and the budget of Young and Hungry struggle to accommodate – multiple scene changes, cars and travel. Projection, particularly over sound effects was a problem at some points.

If you can see all three shows and support Young and Hungry. If you are short on time, Swan Song is the one that really flies, although RPM is worth a viewing too.

Originally published in The Lumière Reader.

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The Young and Hungry Festival of New Works 2008 is currently hosting a banquet at BATS – three courses with something to suit all, particularly those with an appetite for spicy issues. Grab a drink from the bar and settle in for the entrée: Yolk by Arthur Meek.

Meek’s script is ambitious and strong, wavering only in the closing seconds. It presents several issues with clarity and mixes them together. Unfortunately, Yolk is served cold and disconnected. The blocking is static and character interaction poor. Meek’s dialogue is delivered by actors who looked awkward – they have little to do. The play is betrayed by amateur direction. The dialogue needs to be slick and movement needs to strengthen speeches. It’s obvious the cast and crew have put in long hours to put this production on – it’s a shame it’s gone stale.

The main course – Swan Song by Branwen Millar – is energetic and tantalising. Every inch of the stage is used effectively, the movement flows and scene transitions sustain the play’s natural momentum. With strong guidance, these actors explore their characters fully – interacting and conversing with ease. The audience is drawn in from the outset and almost left in tears with a verse about the mute swan at the close. Millar’s script contains some confusion but the play remains a succulent platter to feast upon.

RPM by Dave Armstrong is a good choice for dessert. Although the least original script of the three, the final play is far from bland. The script presents a solid recipe for theatre: jumping swiftly between scenes to first show characters and then quickly develop them. The actors use their skills to create most of their environment skilfully- though mimicking the sound of the car’s engine was unnecessary. The minimal props, effective lighting and well timed sound add well to the composition. The piece is dynamic and poignant, intentionally leaving the audience feeling uncomfortable.

If you’re starved of good theatre, you’ll not be disappointed with what is served up by the young talent in these plays. Food for thought? Certainly – and tasty too.

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There’s lots of thinking and talking about sex, and some action, in all three young and hungry plays.  And teenage angst, though teens have much to angst about being betwixt and between childhood and adulthood, all those peer pressures, hormones of course and wondering what the future will hold for them.  Even with these commonalities, this year’s batch of plays are wonderfully different.

Arthur Meek’s Yolk takes us into the life of Flip (Jennifer Drake, who really nails a tricky character) whose mother is dying of cancer.  Flip’s always been independent, never causing her young mum a second’s trouble in 15 years. But things start to unravel for her as she faces up to being truly alone. 

Flip’s friend Elliot (a scene stealing Ailua Tagiilima) is a cross dresser in a very straight world, while Flip’s other friend Michelle (Peachy Fulford-Wierzbicki), despite seeming flighty, has a boyfriend with whom she’ll only go so far.  In contrast to the other two plays, this one struggles at times with momentum.

Swan Song by Branwen Millar starts with the stabbing death of a young girl – the kind of senseless murder that’s filling our newspapers and bulletins.  Here though, it’s not the murder that’s explored, but the life of the victim, the life lived and the life not lived. 

Swan Song is based on the myth of the mute swan singing a heartbreakingly beautiful song just before it dies.  Here Ashley (Beatrice Joblin), accompanied by her imaginary childhood friend Theresa (Stella Reid), revisits past good times and bad.  Ashly (Katie Montgomerie) meanwhile, projects forward in time.  The two Ashly/Ashleys argue over interpretations of events.  And yes it is a bit confusing.  But director Willem Wassenaar stamps his highly stylised, primary coloured mark on the play and that keeps you focussed.

Forget two cars, one night.  In RPM, Dave Armstrong brings together six young people who share a passion for fast cars and excitement, sexual or otherwise.  The boys talk about cars and the girls talk about boys.

It’s the boy racer culture, one so vilified by the public, and with good reason.  But while Armstrong doesn’t defend the actions, he does give us an idea of why it’s so attractive to many young people.  These kids are no angels – Justine and Luke (Debs Rea and Ashton Henty) are lovers, Vanessa and Sam (Cherri Hartigan and Haden Frost) are going out but not really getting anywhere, while nice guy Phil (Chris Smith) lusts after his mate’s girl and Rose (Anna Pearson) cultivates a hard-ass persona. 

RPM takes place on one night and director Leo Gene Peters keeps the action in top gear from start to finish, getting the most from Armstrong’s richly funny and insightful script.

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The trouble with most commissioned plays is that they are not written because they have to be written; they’re rarely written from the heart. On seeing the three hour-long plays for this year’s Young and Hungry season one after the other is to be thrown into a teenage world as clichéd and confining as anything in High School Musical, Grease, and Rebel Without a Cause.

In other words they are all about sex, ever changing relationships, suicide, fast cars, boring and irrelevant schools and, with the shining exception of the mother in Yolk, parents who are unseen authoritarian monsters.

Also there’s a teacher in Swan Song who is a whip-lashing dominatrix in red high heels, while in Yolk there’s a stereotypical limp-wristed tyro drag queen who makes flip and bitchy remarks all the time, and in RPM an apparently cool Casanova whose sexual experiences, particularly with older women, are not as extensive as he would have his mates believe.

Yolk is about the possibilities of life as well as the burdens of life facing Flip who is watched over by her dying mother who sensibly lets her daughter find her own way through it all. Structurally the play is all over the place.

In Swan Song 17 year-old Ashley looks back on her short life after her death and finds that her swan song if not of great beauty and fulfillment was at least "a glorious snort of life lived."  The play is enlivened with some interesting comically conceived characters such as the late-for-everything Maurice and Ashley’s imaginary friend Theresa.

RPM has boy and girl racers hooning round the streets of Wellington on a Friday night and like the other two plays is made up of numerous short scenes in many different settings with no scene seeming to last more than a couple of minutes except the sex scene (the staging of which is borrowed from Toa Fraser’s Bare) in the cramped back seat of a car.

The young casts are as usual committed, enthusiastic and talented. And as usual some have difficulty with the acoustics of Bats, not because of poor diction or because they were speaking too fast (though both did happen) but because they, like many experienced actors, direct their voices to only half the audience. Time and again one half of a Bats audience will rock with laughter while the other half remains silent.

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Sex and death are the common denominators in the trio of plays that comprise this year’s Young and Hungry festival of new works at BATS. The initiating theme, I believe, was ‘revolution’ although that is not mentioned in current publicity.

Yolk by Arthur Meek, directed by Celia Nicholson:

There is a strong ‘what goes around comes around’ idea at the centre of Yolk. Flip (Phillipa), the product of Shelly’s teenage pregnancy, is now a teenager herself. Her mother, Shelly (Genevieve Bourke), is dying of cancer. Now Flip (Jennifer Drake) wants to get pregnant but she doesn’t have a boyfriend. Nor is she that interested in boys, except her gay best friend Elliot (Ailua Tagiilima) for whom she sews skirts and knits things.

Flip’s other best friend, Michelle (Peachy Fulford-Wierzbicki), does have a boyfriend, Benji (Cody Craddock), but she’s only 15 so draws the line at sex, which leads to an argument, which presents Flip with an opportunity, and Benji, being a boy, obliges, in a tent pitched in the living room. 

Apparently the original script had them all camping clandestinely at Butterfly Creek but the development process put paid to that. It also involved the school kids having to look after eggs, as per the parenting skills course, which contributed something to the title, but that too hit the proverbial floor.

Although there are eggy puns in their names (Shelly and Flip), the title should probably be spelt Yoke since Shelly was told having her baby at such a young age would be a yoke around her neck all her life, whereas Flip has never caused her a moment’s anguish (a fanciful notion, that) but now Shelly has become the yoke around her daughter’s neck.

Given the few young voices poorly pitched and often vying to be heard against background music and SFX (an issue in all three plays), I may have missed crucial words and phrases. But somewhere – in development, rehearsal and/or production – Yolk has lost sight of its core theme of pitting premature death against premature life. I hear the Monro-bewigged Shelly shock her daughter by telling her to go and get drunk and laid but I am not convinced of the process by which it happens.

Ailua Tagiilima queens it with conviction but his sub-plot seems only tenuously linked to the main story, as a different example of being different and/or making choices. Peachy Fulford-Wierzbicki is fully engaged (if vocally light) as Michelle. But overall, not helped by some clunky staging and lighting, this yolk got broke without becoming a tasty or nourishing omelette.

Swan Song by Branwen Millar, directed by Willem Wassenaar:

No change is quite as radical (revolutionary?) as premature death and this is the starting point of Swan Song. Just seventeen, Ashley is murdered, with no whys or wherefores offered. In the limbo of her slowly fading consciousness she recalls aspects of her past and imagines future events forever denied her: the "moments of moment" that comprise a life lived, or not.

Branwen Millar’s script soars on playful planes, kept afloat by Willem Wassenaar’s buoyant directing. He has a great knack of making things interesting even when they make no sense; working with Millar to make us hungry to understand, even though Ashley declares at the end she does not want to search for meaning in her life.

On the way to her final blackout we are treated to broad and bizarre re-enactments and twists on reality that are entirely consistent with an out-of-body brain taking a fresh and satirical look at her world and its people. It’s a stylistically risky approach that pays off. Beatrice Joblin (Ashley), Kate Montgomerie (Ashly) and Stella Reid (Theresa) head a strong and lively ensemble where everyone performs with clear purpose, passion and delight.

The just-deceased Ashley revisits her past: a childhood where she enlists the help of imaginary friend Theresa as her shadow-projected and soon-to-part parents argue; her teenage years, marked by ghastly peer-group popularity Nazis Maddie (Brooke Smith-Harris) and Veronica (Johana Cosgrove) and surreal classroom scenes dominated by a long-suffering teacher (Rachel Burne); a lifelong (such as it is) friendship with a boy called Maurice (William Donaldson).

Completing the splendid cast are Jackson Taylor as Jonathon, and Tom Hollow as Miles, the boy Ashley likes except he is more interested in the worldly ways of a Foreign Exchange Student, played by Kathryn Lees.

The still-alive Ashly experiences things that have never happened, including an intellectually intense and sexually awkward affair with a university lecturer (Max Hardy); discovering G-sus as her saviour; being a rock-band groupie … (there is potential for expansion here in the dramatisation, once free of the 50-minute stipulation). And the playground game Bullrush is metaphorically employed to sum up life and death as depending on when you’re ‘it’.

For me, Swan Song is the ‘not to be missed’ pick of this year’s plays – closely followed by RPM.

RPM by Dave Armstrong, directed by Leo Gene Peters

There is revolution in the title and the boy and girl racers RPM depicts are certainly judged by many as revolting. This is Dave Armstrong’s contribution to a genre that arguably started with the classic movie Rebel Without a Cause, followed by American Graffiti, then found life on the local stage through Gary Henderson’s Sunset Café and David Geary’s King of Stains.

Most of the characters are refugees from dysfunctional parents. Justine (Debs Rea) and Vanessa (Cherri Hartigan) use each other as alibis to hit the streets in search of petrol-head thrills. The well-crafted plot follows the fraught relationships between Justine and rich boy Luke (Ashton Henty), and Vanessa and the rather nerdy Sam (Hayden Frost).

Luke’s mechanic mate Phil (Chris Smith) has a bit more respect for himself and others while Hutt Valley girl Rose (Anna Pearson) takes no nonsense from anyone. In the course of one night, everything changes for all of them.

I was a little doubtful when it started with steering-wheel clutching actors "brrrmmm-brrrmmming’ around the stage like children, until I realised this childish game-playing motif was the point. Director Leo Gene Peters does an excellent job of meeting the staging challenges, skilfully employing props, lighting and sound to evoke locations and the car-centred actions. As an exercise in taking us places we’d never normally get to go, RPM works a treat.

As a general comment on all three plays, I note that while all involve early sorties into teenage sex, no-one seems to experience the kind of ‘true love’ that leads to real ‘heartbreak’. Nor is love, or anger, or any strongly-felt emotion, apparent in response to the death. Are today’s youth really that suppressed or sociopathic?

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