Given that the attention span of today’s young people is supposed to be five
minutes, it seems astonishing that they, and their forebears, have been able
to sustain an enterprise that has lasted 50 years. First launched by Harold
Hobson, then our chief drama critic, and supported by this paper ever since,
the 50th annual Sunday Times National Student Drama Festival has just taken
place. Back in January 1956 there were just four productions competing for a
single trophy, but, as we learn from the festival’s new history, Raw Talent
(Oberon Books £12.99), even then the NSDF could spot a winner: the top
production was directed by a future theatrical knight, Sir Timothy West.
Since then, the festival has grown in all directions. This year there were 84
shows entered by a rich variety of schools, youth groups, university theatre
departments and drama societies, of which 10 were invited to perform during
a week-long series of events in Scarborough, the festival’s home since 1990.
There are now more than 1,000 participants, and the post-show discussions
and celebrity chats of 1956 have become an extensive programme of workshops
and masterclasses covering every aspect of the performer’s art. There is a
daily newspaper where tomorrow’s critics can cut their teeth; performances
burst out of half a dozen different theatre spaces onto the beach. Every day
the festival comes together in Alan Ayckbourn’s Stephen Joseph
theatre-in-the-round to debate, like an Athenian democracy, the quality of
work on display.
The festival has also acquired an international dimension, with visiting
productions this year from Holland, Spain, Belgium and the Czech Republic
that give British students an opportunity to measure their efforts against
the best achievements of other student festivals. The heart of the festival,
however, continues to be work that reflects the present and future direction
of this country’s theatre.
The NSDF was launched in the dawn of Britain’s post-war theatrical revolution.
Later in 1956, George Devine, who spoke at the first festival, directed John
Osborne’s Look Back in Anger as part of his first season at the Royal Court.
Harold Hobson had what he called “a revelation” when a student production at
the 1958 festival introduced him to the work of the almost unknown Harold
Pinter. This new theatre emerged at a time of national uncertainty and
bewilderment. In 1956, Britain went to war against an Arab country, Egypt,
and found that an assertion of moral authority produced disquiet and
dissension, not national unity. Nor did rising post-war affluence seem to be
solving the problems of political alienation and social deprivation.
Fifty years on, a similar bewilderment afflicts the angry young men — and
women — of today. The language of the theatre has become vastly extended, as
the judges at this year’s festival, the directors Geraldine Connor and Nick
Stimson and myself, willingly recognised, but underneath there is a similar
response: satire and absurdity subvert the authority of institutions; the
cruelty of the world is met with savage laughter.
There can be few more direct demonstrations of this than Edinburgh
University’s revival of Justin Butcher’s extended monologue, Scaramouche
Jones, a tour de force for the young actor Thom Tuck. The horror of the 20th
century is caught in a single image when a 100-year-old white-faced mime
breaks his silence to reveal, in his final performance, that he survived the
Holocaust by making children laugh as they stood beside their graves. The
tortures inflicted by the Nazis on homosexuals and Jews are likewise made to
seem a cruel, absurdist joke in Queen’s University Belfast’s revival of
Martin Sherman’s Bent, where two men are made to move rocks pointlessly from
one pile to another and back again, with the intention that this futile
labour will drive them mad. With moving tenderness, Jonny McMillen and Neal
McWilliams (who won a judges’ commendation for his performance) showed that
love can conquer cruelty, if only for a moment.
The savagery of history, both ancient and modern, came together in Warwick
University’s revival of Steven Berkoff’s Greek. None of the cast can have
been alive when Berkoff’s parodic, plague-struck 1970s Britain first became
the backdrop for his foul-mouthed reworking of the Oedipus myth. Originally
written for a cast of four, here Bridget Gregory’s production adds a
white-faced chorus of 13, whose bodies supply not only an ingenious
physical-theatre commentary on the action, but the necessary stage furn-
iture as well. Berkoff’s trudging, girning sentences can become tedious, but
James Barton won a commendation for the light, engaging touch he brought to
the part of Eddie. The Berkovian punch line is that when this modern Oedipus
discovers he has been sleeping with his mother, he carries on regardless.
Such liberties are not available to the central character in You Have 10
Minutes, “a devised comedy in three buckets” from Ralph Thoresby High
School. When you see that an actor is confined to her wheelchair, the
comforting response is pity, but Kate Eveleigh and her three fellow
performers almost fling that in our face, as they literally spew their fury
at the institutional cruelty that the disabled can suffer. Mixing comedy and
tragedy, these excrement-smeared figures in outsize nappies are angry almost
to the point of incoherence, as Eveleigh spins in her wheelchair, one wheel
locked, emblematically going nowhere. Her poignant, unanswered call is,
“Help me.”
The same innocent bewilderment is heard in the voices of the refugee children
in Lewisham College’s devised piece Babel, asking: “What did I do wrong?”
Babel is modern Britain. This touching meditation in music, film and
movement on the plight of those who have arrived, sometimes illegally, on
these hostile shores is made all the more powerful by the realisation that
the testimony of these teenagers is very much their own. This, like You Have
10 Minutes, is political theatre for the 21st century, hurt as well as
angry, but finding some kind of redemption through the act of its making.
Oppression comes in many forms. The quintet of beautiful young women in Derby
University’s revival of Deborah Levy’s The B File may have health, looks and
silky underwear, but they are also victims, reduced to sexual objects,
commodities in a consumer society. Stylishly performed, a production that
depended so much on its look, and on looking, rightly won awards for
lighting design.
There is something sinister about surveillance; the nature of control, of
social convention as covert discipline, shapes Tea Without Mother, a devised
piece from Dartington College of Arts that became the most acclaimed work in
the festival, and which will go on to represent the NSDF at student
festivals abroad. The quartet of performers “live in a world without
weather”, a world drained of significance and emotion, dominated by “mother”
— a silent, watching female on a portable tele- vision monitor who has the
power to pull the cast into sudden gestures and postures. The elegant,
authoritative figure of her son (Mark Stephens, winning an award for his
performance) struggles to protect, yet escape from, this dominating
presence, breaking away to take tea — a discreet metaphor for sex — without
her.
The humour, crispness and precision that distinguished Tea Without Mother also
marked out another social satire where sex and violence break the social
sur- face: Wycherley’s restoration comedy The Country Wife. Backed by the
full resources of its costume, lighting and design departments, Rose Bruford
College’s immaculate production shows that our drama schools are not
neglecting the disciplines of stagecraft, nor the lessons to be learnt from
tackling a classic text. However, it was the wit and skill of the actors —
notably Declan Harvey’s sparkling fop — that won them an award.
When, in 1956, Leeds University Union’s theatre group entered a play by
Pirandello, they cannot have imagined that, 50 festivals on, their
successors would still be pushing forward the limits of theatricality.
Seventeen music theatre students from Leeds’ Bretton Hall campus devised and
presented a puzzling yet profoundly rewarding piece, ECIOV. Winning prizes
for both design and performance, they showed skills as musicians, singers,
dancers and actors that came together in a work, closer to rite than drama,
that explored the limits of freedom and control, pleasure and pain, through
images of striking beauty.
Beauty is the last word that could be applied to the surroundings and
inhabitants of the Sinkwell Estate, the desperate location of the University
of Kent’s outrageous Mikey the Musical. The illegitimate child of The Rocky
Horror Show and Grease, it gives two fingers to just about every aspect of
contemporary society, including the convention that shows are performed with
a minimum of care and attention. Like a vehicle out of control, it roars
over the speed bumps of production standards and does handbrake turns with
the plot. Written and directed by Joel Horwood, winner of this year’s
Cameron Mackintosh award, this coarse comedy of chavs and pikeys, of low
expectations and drug highs, rejoices in being appalling in just about every
sense of the word.
Yet here is life, here is energy, and here, quite possibly, is a hit in the
making. Raw talent, savage laughter, and loud enough to echo down another 50
years.
The National Student Drama Festival is financially assisted by Arts
Council England, Awards for All, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation,
Scarborough Borough Council, the Mackintosh Foundation, the Noël Coward
Foundation, and The Sunday Times Company Awards
And the prizes went to ...
University of Kent at Canterbury (Mikey the Musical)
Dartington College of Arts (Tea Without Mother)
Rose Bruford College (The Country Wife)
University of Leeds, Bretton Hall (ECIOV)
Company Design Awards
Lighting: Derby University (The B File)
Set and sound design: University of Leeds, Bretton Hall
(ECIOV)
Acting Award
Mark Stephens (Dartington)
Acting Commendations
Neal McWilliams (Queen’s University Belfast)
James Barton (Warwick University)
Declan Harvey (Rose Bruford College)
Cameron Mackintosh Award
Joel Horwood (University of Kent)
Theatre Record Young Critic’s Award
Imogen Walford (Cambridge),
Marsha Vinogradova (Copt Hill School)
PMA Writer’s Award
Lucy Caldwell (Oxford)
Plays-on-the-Net.Com International Playscript Competition
Jennifer Tuckett (UEA)
Stage Electrics Award for Lighting (in association with Martin
Professional)
Andy Purves (Derby University)
Stage Electrics Award for Technical Achievement
Lucy Thorpe (Derby University)
Stage Electrics Award for Sound
Gordon Nimmo-Smith (Leeds)
The Festgoers Award (by popular vote)
Tea Without Mother (Dartington)
