Thursday 22nd October
4 stars
Standing in the foyer waiting to go into Simon Stephens’ latest play Punkrock really put to shame those naysayers who bleat that theatre never attracts a youthful audience. It also put paid to the opening line I’d been mentally penning all the way from Piccadilly Gardens. For as soon as I stepped foot in the place, it became plain that my planned musings about the Royal Exchange not being a particularly ‘punk rock’ kind of theatre (its clientele tending to be more ‘daytrip to Blackpool to buy rock’) had been woefully undermined by the presence of several coach loads of fresh faced teens.
And how glad I was to be undermined. It would have been a huge waste had Punkrock, with its sixth-form age characters and thrashing soundtrack, had to play to a huddle of octogenarians who would have secretly preferred Noel Coward. Set in the upper school library of a Stockport private college, Punkrock is a heady clash of teenage philosophy- and no, not just the school of iPod therefore I am. The play is crafted from the kind of conversations you can only have when you’re 17 – from grandiose meanderings on the nature of humanity to angst-filled panic over mock exams. Love, loss, identity, sexuality and class are all given a hearing. Particularly compelling are the musings of disturbed teen William (Tom Sturridge), who rails against the limits of his suburban hometown.
Helped along by uniformly (no pun intended) excellent, nuanced performances from the young cast, Stephen’s script motors along smoothly and before you know it just another morning break time morphs seamlessly into a Columbine-style atrocity.
Many hands have been wrung over whether Punkrock adds anything new. Comparisons to everything from Lord of the Flies to The History Boys have been flung at the play, yet look at the play closely and none of these should stick. Stephens’ script effectively offers a rebuttal to youth-culture-according-to-Skins, despite the bleak climax of the play (which is as jolting as the bursts of Big Black and Sonic Youth et al. that punctuate each scene) Punkrock remains a play suffused in the importance of normality.
How refreshing that Lilly (Jessica Raine) is permitted to describe losing her virginity as “lovely”. How significant that Stephens doesn’t insist on framing it in terms of teen pregnancy or angst or pain, rather he just allows it to happen; sensibly, premeditated and with enjoyment. How un-Skins. Likewise, the final scene of the play, for all its odd, purgatorial overtones, set in a psychiatrist’s office, serves to remind us that even after the unthinkable has happened, normality prevails.