IF behaving naturally and incredibly on stage constitutes good acting, the Dublin Youth Theatre has the knack of it and of passing it on. Their new production of Mark O'Rowe's Buzzin' To Bits, at the Project, continues the tradition after twenty years, it is hardly anything less - of peopling the play with young new talents who are improbably relaxed, convincing, and entertaining.
They fit into the play's Dublin housing estate, probably in Tallaght (there are references to mountains), with ease. Charlie O'Neill's excellent set design provides them with a concrete ambience of streets, playground and field, and here the teenagers gossip, flirt, drink cider and smoke, including a little hash. Their preoccupation with sex is still mostly talk, though their language is explicit enough.
In the background, the drug scene pressures them in different ways. Some avoid it like the plague, others are still at the crossroads, and a few are already into the pushers-out movement, but for different reasons. Genuine, if immature, concern is one motivation, but so is the macho violence of the vigilante. They overlap in an assault on the home of a drug-dealing family.
The script is far from flawless. It dives into diversionary cul-de-sacs to a distracting extent and goes over the top in the depiction and overblown language of a final scene in which brother taunts brother to prove his manhood in blood-letting. But if a few such excesses strike false notes, the dialogue and character-drawing mostly fit the actors like gloves, and they seize their opportunities with gusto.
To name some of them in what is clearly a communal endeavour would be to fall into sins of omission, but a representative couple - the nearest the play gets to young lovers - may be acceptable. Emmet Kirwan's Geetar and Maria Schweppe's Suzanne exemplify the easy, persuasive and attractive essence of youth a-growing which makes the production so likeable. And Veronica Coburn's direction hits the target continuously. Nice one, DYT.
