New Connections
The New Connections festival of new plays about young people performed by pupils at schools and colleges around Britain is nothing but good news, in theory at least, and all hail Bank of America for supporting this year’s programme.
It’s a sort of Sunday in the park, by George, with characters assembling under a spreading tree as a wedding groom plans to meet his birth mother, a boy called Kubrick films the encounters, a single mother deals with a baby doll, and two girls in red polka dot dresses behave badly.
So professional is the ambition and execution, you wonder: if Irish theatre composer Conor Mitchell is so talented, why isn’t someone putting on his stuff? And then: why is Mitchell himself so trapped in Sondheim’s arid example? Our musical theatre needs him desperately, but when will there be a breakthrough? Where’s his Cameron Mackintosh?
The Dummy Tree wasn’t great but it was both mightily impressive and a mighty relief after Anthony Horowitz’s A Handbag performed by pupils at More House School in Farnham, Surrey, a stilted riff on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest eked out by children in a special needs institution with attitude.
Horowitz once wrote a dodgy stage thriller, Mindgame, set in an experimental hospital for the criminally insane in Suffolk. This marks no great advance, though his popularity as a writer is indisputable as the author of the Alex Rider books for teenagers and Foyle’s War on television.
The acting and writing wasn’t a patch on what you can see in youth theatre workshops at Hampstead Theatre or the Donmar, and there’s a hopeless false premise at its heart which is that Lady Bracknell’s “handbag” is a handbag, when it was really a large leather Gladstone Bag.
And why does the National suddenly go all “clubby” with loud piped music, unnecessary projections and rotten speeches by the authors just because it’s “for the kids.” At least we’re spared balloons all over the place, which happened one year under Trevor Nunn; he passed them on to Richard Eyre who then directed Mary Poppins. See where it leads you?
