Review: OUR GENERATION, National Theatre

Stir a little of Dennis Potter's children-playing-adults television play, Blue Remembered Hills, a little of Michael Apted's long-running documentary series, Seven Up!, and a whole lot of Alecky Blythe's own unforgettable London Road, and you'll have something of the epic Our Generation.

Five years in the making, Blythe's verbatim play tracks the lives of 12 tweens and teens as they navigate the choppy waters of adolescence provoking cheers and tears along the way. The words have been edited from over 650 hours of recorded conversation - including some (entirely understandable and very funny) attempts by exasperated parents to rope in the microphone-holding collector to win the kind of argument that has gone on since time immemorial. As a parent, I want to write "We've all been there" at this point, but the genius of the play is that the phrase applies equally to the teens - the specificity of these very vivid, utterly unique lives paints a universal picture, a collage of what we would have been were we born in the 2000s.

That said, the long-established roiling pot of adolescent peer pressure, self-esteem issues and sexual anxiety has had its heat cranked up to 11 by this generation's ever-present phones and insistent social media. Like malevolent devils, Insta and Snapchat sit permanently on their left shoulders, whispering pain into their ears. Theatre has yet to come to terms with just how integral phones are to young people's lives, so this production may be the first to reflect their impact, both physically and psychologically.

After the double editing process (once to sift the most promising kids to follow with the mics from the swathes of little humans in a school and again to sieve the words we hear from the words left on the cutting room floor), key themes emerge. Perhaps, more accurately, we should say key themes are selected to emerge.

The girls are plagued by fragile confidence relentlessly undercut by impossible standards set by media celebrities cynically sold to them as ideals to which they should aspire. It takes years to develop the carapace required to shrug off that kind of weaponised beauty and these girls haven't got to the stage when they can embrace the ethos of "This Is Me" (Frozen is name-checked, but The Greatest Showman is not). I was once told that teenage girls' media comprises three messages: "This is what's wrong with you"; "Here is someone who has solved that problem"; "This is what you need to do (ie buy) to solve it too". The play shows the cynical power of that proposition.

The boys reveal their developing sense of self more through macho bravura, coy boasts about girlfriends and laddish joshing, the verbal equivalent of play-fighting. The song that comes to mind here is "Turn It Off" from The Book Of Mormon - all that effort to hide the inevitable damage caused by the storm of adolescence might well turn pathological, and, for some, even the more unlikely ones, it does.

So far, so grim, but kids are natural comedians and gales of laughter regularly swirl around the house as the unaffected humour young people find in each others' company simply bubbles over. A brother and sister bicker, the barbs underpinned by a grudging respect and a lot of love; the gaucheness we all once had in describing our love lives is sweetly amusing; the everlasting certainties of one day soon consigned to the past with little more than the flick of a fringe, can be hilarious.

It's perhaps here that one sees both the dazzling technical skills of the (mainly) young ensemble cast and the seductive reconstructed realities of verbatim theatre. Every one of the company succeeds brilliantly in bringing their kid to life (so too the three older actors who play parents and teachers) - so how much of what we see is rooted in the performer's charisma, their ability to find the pathos, and how much in the teen whose words they are speaking? And, to be fair, does that question even matter? Likewise with the humour - though verbatim theatre retains the stops, starts and hesitations of the speech exactly as it was spoken, the alchemy of timing a laughline lies in the delivery not the recording.

And then... lockdown.

Director Daniel Evans has conjured an extraordinary show from this extraordinary material, with special praise due to Dee Ahluwalia, Anushka Chakaravarti, Hélder Fernandes and Poppy Shepherd, all of whom make their professional debuts with huge success. Over the show's intimidatingly long runtime, we grow to love these kids, fear for them, celebrate with them, laugh and cry with them - so much so, that we'd go back tomorrow for another four hours or so to see what happens next.

However, there's a but. Unlike London Road and Do We Look Like Refugees?, Blythe is working this time with children transitioning to young adults and, while we hardly needed the programme's statement that "The National Theatre has been committed to ensuring the young people's welfare", there's Safeguarding and safeguarding. Though not as exposed as the contestants on Love Island and other reality TV shows that have left a wake of broken human beings behind them, one wonders how these kids will look back on the long experience culminating in their lives being portrayed on stage. How much informed consent can a kid or a parent give to such a project?

On reflection, an unease began to gnaw at me, a sense that, for all the joy in the work and the sensitivity in its construction, it inevitably occasionally slid towards "poverty porn" voyeurism. Even with tickets more affordable than West End prices, there's likely to be a gulf in social class either side of the fourth wall. I can't help reflecting that my admiration for the artistic achievement is tempered by a hope that nobody tries to do this again - it's probably just too dangerous without the experience and resources available to this production.

Our Generation is at The National Theatre until 9 April and at Chichester Festival Theatre from 22 April until 14 May.

Photo Johan Persson

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