Child abuse, Norman Tebbit, crazy Christians in the Fens, an American soldier
lost in the moonscape of Vietnam, a murderess for a mother, a virgin birth,
a megalo-maniac director, a doomed relationship, a lover decapitated on TV —
what is it about the coming generation that keeps them so cheerful? Are all
families dysfunctional, with nasty secrets hidden in the furniture? Is the
world really so mad, grim and dark as the collective consciousness of the
52nd Sunday Times National Student Drama Festival appears to portray it?
Since it was launched in 1956 by the Sunday Times drama critic Harold Hobson,
this festival has been an annual opportunity to measure the morale of a
generation who in a short time will be acting on our stages, working in our
television studios, writing in our newspapers, teaching our children. Their
tastes and preoccupations are going to change our world.
Based in Scarborough since 1990, the festival has grown from a simple sequence
of performances into a seven-day, 24-hour operation that gives 800 or more
young people the opportunity not just to measure themselves against their
peers but to learn about every aspect of the craft of performance, from
writing to lighting, stage fighting to theatre funding.
It takes courage to enter. You first have to pass the scrutiny of a theatre
professional, who will come to see your production on your home ground. If
invited to Scarborough, you will be reviewed in Noises Off, the nightly
newspaper with its own team of tyro critics vying for the Sunday Times
Harold Hobson Student Drama Critic Award and the Theatre Record Young
Critic’s Award. You will also be called to account in the discussions, where
everyone comes together to praise — and to blame — the work they have seen.
And you will be judged. This year, I was joined by the actors Charlotte
Emmerson and Ian Reddington, bringing their enthusiasm and their experience
of working everywhere from the National to Coronation Street.
It was especially brave of Warwick School to enter Ionesco’s Victims of Duty.
Alarmingly, the classics, even modern classics of absurdist drama, seem out
of favour with the present generation, and there was no text performed older
than this, from 1953. But with the confidence of youth, and wisely guided by
their tutor Mike Perry, these A-level students produced a witty and stylish
interpretation of Ionesco’s exploration of theatricality and Freudian memory
that won them a commendation for theatrical sophistication. Perry, who was a
student performer at the festival 20 years ago, won the Directors’ Guild
Award for creating the framework within which his cast could flourish.
It was Ionesco’s aim to expose the irrationality that lies beneath the
comfortable conventions of the bourgeois family. In Jez Butterworth’s 2002
Royal Court drama, The Night Heron, the rational gives way to religious
mania as ancient atavistic passions resurface in the Cambridgeshire Fens.
The University of Warwick were also brave to choose this flawed play, but it
was the direction and the performances we were there to judge. As two sacked
college gardeners desperately clinging onto survival, and each other, in the
gloomy dankness of their cottage, Jack Cole and Jack Lowe, with Elizabeth
Sands as their psychotic lodger, successfully held the play together. What
must have made them choose it was its wonderful weirdness, as exotic as the
straying bird that gives the play its title.
Adam Rapp’s Stone Cold Dead Serious, given its European premiere by the
University of York, offers similar attractions. This is the American
nightmare: a family as mad as the Simpsons, but without the laughs. An
incontinent father stares at the TV all day, the daughter is a junkie
turning tricks, the mother is the exhausted wage earner; only the son, Wynne
(Ed Watson), has found a way out. His computer-gaming skills have won him a
place in a real-life television play-off against master swordsmen. At some
stage, the play parts with reality as, in an awkward narration, we hear
Wynne’s co-competitor and new-found girlfriend (Lucy Farrett) lose her head
to a ninja sword and Wynne attempt seppuku. Yet somehow William Bowry’s
direction made us suspend disbelief.
The decision to engage with the wilder aspects of American family life
demonstrates the extent to which Britain and America, for better or worse,
share a common culture. Al Smith, a former student at the University of
Edinburgh, now on the first steps of his career as a professional writer,
won the 2006 Sunday Times Playwriting Award with a drama about the making of
the atomic bomb. This year, he returned to his all-American theme with a
60-minute monologue, Radio, which takes us from postwar optimism to
Vietnam-war despair. Beautifully crafted in its language and symbolism,
Smith’s account of the journey of one American family shows the tragedy of
an expansive nation that can reach for the moon — and land in the quagmire
of Vietnam. As the storyteller, Tom Ferguson won two new prizes: the Timothy
West Award for attention to the text, and the Spotlight Award for best
actor; Smith again took the Sunday Times writing award. Thanks to Hull Truck
Theatre Company, the festival was also able to introduce a new award for
writers. The company ran a writers’ workshop throughout the week, with the
prospect of a commission at the end. Young A-level student Laura Neal is now
working on what could become her first professionally produced play.
I hope Neal’s play will be a comedy, for the 2007 festival offered little
light relief. There was none to be had in Lee Barnes’s story of a failed
relationship,Talking in the Darkness (Calderdale College), and even when we
were offered satire, in Charlie Brafman’s Cast Aside(University of
Nottingham), the grotesquerie of rehearsals for an experimental production
of The Merchant of Venice sharply divided the festival between intellectuals
who found it self-indulgent and hedonists desperate for a laugh. The
intellectuals were right, but Brafman showed he has a future as a
scriptwriter, and Edward Hancock won a commendation for his comic bravura as
a Welshman with unusual ways of handling a leek.
Grotesquerie and bravura were strongly on show in the University of
Winchester’s The Ordinaries, one of only two productions to escape the
dominant tone of gritty realism. The director, Edward Wren, and his company
showed real poetic invention in their use of language, costume and props.
The family sofa, through which the characters would appear and disappear,
contained the whole world of the Ordinary family, where teaspoons danced
enchantingly and kettles announced they had boiled. But the sofa also hid
the family secret, the abuse of daughter Sarah, a sad-faced puppet lovingly
given life by her operator, Clare Pointing, and given death by her family.
The politics of murder was the theme of the University of Nottingham’s revival
of Robin Soans’s 2005 verbatim drama Talking to Terrorists. The cast have
had their own conversations with some of those whose edited interviews with
Soans formed the text of the play: Norman Tebbit, Terry Waite and former
ambassador Craig Murray. This undoubtedly helped the cast to play their
multiple roles, from IRA bomber to Palestinian gunman to Mo Mowlam to
Tebbit. The even-handedness of the approach convinced us of the tragedy of
terrorism, but offered no resolution, beyond the need to keep talking.
Yet redemption was on offer at the festival, through love and through art.
Northumbria University’s revival of Rona Munro’s 2002 family tragedy Iron
demonstrated that something can be recovered from the bleakest of
situations. Set in a high-security jail, Iron shows a mother and daughter
meeting for the first time in 15 years, after the mother has been given life
for the murder of the girl’s father. The daughter (Charlotte Binns) wants to
recover the blanked-out memory of her childhood, but prison appears to have
crazed and brutalised her mother, and it is a painful process for them both.
The play places a terrible burden on a young actress asked to portray a
murderess old before her time. Helen Embleton rose to the challenge
magnificently, winning the Spotlight Award for best actress by a mile.
In the University of Edinburgh’s uplifting Haozkla, we were given the solace
and enchantment the festival needed. Under the shaping eye of their
director, Jeremy Bidgood, this delightful company, none of them drama
students, created a piece that combined Bali-nese puppetry with commedia
dell’ arte characterisations to tell a story with the archetypal elements of
a folk tale and all the knowing wit of a modern cartoon. Rarely have a pair
of hands spoken so eloquently, or an angel so convincingly materialised out
of sticks and a strip of cloth. The story hardly matters: here was magic,
here was creativity. Here, in spite of everything, was hope.
The National Student Drama Festival is financially supported by The Sunday
Times, Arts Council England, Scarborough Borough Council, the Calouste
Gulbenkian Foundation, the Mackintosh Foundation and the Noël Coward
Foundation; www.nsdf.com
The winners
Buzz Goodbody Student Director Award: Jeremy Bidgood (U of Edinburgh)
Sunday Times Playwriting Award: Al Smith (U of Edinburgh)
Spotlight Award for best actress: Helen Embleton (Northumbria U)
Spotlight Award for best actor: Tom Ferguson (U of Edinburgh)
The Hull Truck Theatre Commission: Laura Neal (Chigwell College)
International Student Playscript Competition: Kerry Kidd (U of
Nottingham) Directors’ Guild Award: Mike Perry (Warwick School)
Timothy West Award: Tom Ferguson (U of Edinburgh)
Judges’ Award for creative ensemble: Haozkla (U of Edinburgh)
Judges’ commendations, for poetic invention: The Ordinaries (U of
Winchester); for theatrical sophistication: Victims of Duty (Warwick
School); for direction: William Bowry (U of York); for performance:
Elizabeth Sands, Jack Cole, Jack Lowe (U of Warwick); for comedy:
Edward Hancock (U of Nottingham)
Design Awards, sound: Laura Cox (U of Edinburgh); lighting: Neil
Hobbs (U of Edinburgh); set and costume: Haozkla (U of Edinburgh)
Stephen Joseph Theatre Production Award: Joanne Phipps (U of Warwick)
Stage Electrics Awards, sound: Matt Chisholm (Liverpool Institute for
Performing Arts); lighting: Mike Williams (LIPA); technical
achievement: Ben Locke (U of Hull)
Sunday Times Harold Hobson Student Drama Critic Award: Phil Mann (East
15 Acting School)
Theatre Record Young Critic’s Award: Richard Watson (Codsall
Community High School)
Festgoers’ Award (by popular vote): Radio (U of Edinburgh)
