Writers: Chloë Lawrence-Taylor, Paul Sirett and Alys Metcalf
Director: Victoria Cackett (Brain Play) and Sidney Evans (You 2.0)
The final night of the National Connections Festival 2025, taking place in the Dorfman Theatre, offers two pieces that examine self-care and the role of positive mental health. Bringing together students from Chatham and Clarendon Grammar School performing Chloë Lawrence-Taylor and Paul Sirret’s Brain Play with Everyman Youth Theatre’s version of You 2.0 by Alys Metcalf, this thirtieth anniversary season comes to a close with mature reflections on what it means to be a young carer and the challenges of being your best self against the odds.
Performing first, Lawrence-Taylor and Sirret’s play focuses on 15-year-old Mia, who blames herself when she falls asleep one Friday night and misses her dad’s car accident that means he is unable to leave the house and suffers from a hearing disorder related to his injury. Dropping out of school to understand the medical science and try to help him recover, her journey takes her to an academic in London, while her own ‘brain chorus’ – a manifestation of her paranoia – proves hard to shake.
Chatham and Clarendon Grammar School from Kent take an inventive approach in their staging, and while this is one of the few pieces in the Festival to feature a small central cast of Mia and friends, pupils also take on the roles of the Brain Chorus who dramatise Mia’s inner life as well as performing live music and acting as puppeteers, creating all of the adult characters from dresses on hangers, shoes and glasses. There are some important themes here about the failure of adults to support Mia, including her father and teachers, leaving her in a position of vulnerability and this is a big role for lead Apollo Stocker who carries much of the action, reflecting as significantly on her need for help as giving support to her parent.
Everyman Youth Theatre from Cardiff also put their ensemble to good use as hugely entertaining components of a therapy video game in Metcalf’s You 2.0, which promises the player “a happier you.” The players are Martha (Amelie Osborn), who has been suspended from school for a week and instructed to play the game as punishment – a fact she tries to conceal from her mum – and Isaac (Reuben Turpy), who chooses the game to deal with grief when his IRL friends let him down. With both highly cynical at the start, they soon find an unlikely connection and the self-improvement they crave.
The company have a great deal of fun staging this lively play, dramatising the levels of the game including “Freud or Fraud” and “Snakes and Social Ladders” as well as donning a variety of illustrative costumes from “Ball of Stress” to “Mindless Monster” and even an old blue-light emitting mobile phone that steals sleep. There is a good balance of scenes inside and outside the game, showing the external pressures both Martha and Isaac experience, with strong work from the leads who eventually find something real through their hilarious avatars played by Alison Jones and Finn Rex.
Concluding with a note that the Connections Festival has lived through the reign of two monarchs, nine Prime Ministers and five Directors of the National Theatre, the next 30 years are only just beginning.
Reviewed on 28 June 2025
