Writers: Titas Halder/ Elgan Rhys with Leo Drayton
Directors: Rachel France/Bethan Lilley
As the Connections Festival at the National Theatre draws to its final performances of the week, it’s good to know that the future of theatre is in good hands, especially if the quality of the shows presented is anything to go by. On the festival’s penultimate night, students from Lincoln’s Sir Robert Pattinson Academy and Swansea’s Ysgol Gyfun Gwyr continue the high standards seen in the rest of the week.
The Sir Robert Pattinson Academy has been given the most difficult play of the festival to perform. Titas Halder’s Replica is an odd, menacing, time-shifting piece that deals with being an outsider in school and the strange limbo between childhood and adulthood. But despite the play’s complex structure, Sir Robert Pattinson Academy leans into Halder’s macabrely absurd world straight from the start.
Replica starts with an extended movement section where actions are mimed and doors flickering with red lights are moved around the stage, all to pulsing beats from Music Director Daniel Pennington. For the next 70 minutes, the tension never eases although a few shards of humour occasionally break through.
Alex, the fictional school’s mean girl (a confident performance from Neve Jenkison), announces that fellow student Sam is not himself since coming back from a school trip to visit some caves where prehistoric drawings have been discovered. She thinks he’s been replaced by an automaton or a spirit and she is determined that the other students will agree with her verdict.
Foucauldian ideas about truth being power and truth being slippery compel Alex to spread rumours about Sam’s changeling identity. But it’s not just Sam who feels different since the cave day-trip; other pupils feel changed, too, after seeing a replica of the cave’s monolith in the immersive museum near the ancient site. However, Alex’s authority means that soon all the school rounds up on Sam.
As Sam’s only friend, Cora (a superb Sofia Marrows) tries to quash the gossip going around the school, but her defence is not enough to prevent Sam (Elliott Stripling, cleverly ambiguous to the end) being dragged to the school’s lab for some tests to establish if he is human. Marrow’s rendition of Radiohead’s Creep is the heart-thumping climax of the show suggesting that Sam’s feelings of isolation are common to any teenager growing up in a world where sacredness is forever out of reach.
As trans rights become weaponised in British politics, Elgan Rhys’s new play couldn’t come at a better time. Performed almost entirely in the Welsh language by Ysgol Gyfun Gwyr, Rhys’s Dy Enw Marw (Your Name Is Dead) begins with a trans teenager choosing his new name. It’s a huge day for him, but his celebrations are cut short when his mother, formerly supportive of his trans identity, goes missing.
This may be a big issue play, but the location of a small Welsh town with its chip shops, cafes and old people’s homes grounds the action firmly in the real world. Conversations about name changes and personal pronouns must be taking place everywhere around the UK. Rhys’s play shows how trans politics are a nationwide concern, not just restricted to metropolises and social media.
Orion Summers gives an incredible performance as M, the trans teenager learning to look outwards as well as inwards. Summers is well-supported by Betsi Jenkins who plays M’s boyfriend. Although a cis boy, Bobi wonders if he, too, should change his name, unburdening himself of his parents’ expectations. Indeed, Dy Enw Marw suggests that all cis-gendered people could learn something from trans people’s struggle to be fully themselves. As M says, life is a jigsaw for everyone.
The couple, who will win your hearts, are joined on stage by a small, for the festival’s standards, cast. Eleri Gibbs is very funny as posh girl Ceridwen while Ella Thomas brings pathos to the part of M’s mother. Ysgol Gyfun Gwry’s production could and should go on the road from tomorrow, touring schools and colleges about the problems that trans people face every day.
Actually, both Replica and Dy Enw Marw deserve longer runs as they describe what it means to be young today in ways that are compassionately authentic.
Reviewed on 28 June 2024
The National Theatre Connections Festival runs until 29 June 2024
