Lyric Theatre, Belfast
****
The silicone chip inside William Carlisle’s head is set to overload, but like his peers at a prestigious English grammar school, he disguises his fears and self-doubts beneath a thin veneer of bravado and intellectual swagger. There is not one ounce of sentimentality in Simon Stephens’s remarkable, unpredictable play, which connects with teenagers - and with everyone who has ever been a teenager - in a manner that is immediate, disturbing and beautifully crafted.
As its all-too-familiar horror unspools, it becomes evident that the meat of the story takes place in the past tense. Fast forward into the neat dramatic symmetry of the challenging final scene, where Rhys Dunlop’s needy, delusional William emerges as a mirror image of the local chavs, which he and bewitching new girl Lily (Lauren Coe) deride and mimic.
With the looks of an innocent child, Lily is very much a woman of the world, her attraction to the casually handsome Nicholas (Jonah Hauer-King) adding a frisson of tension into the broiling mix of the sixth form common room - a space perfectly rendered by designer Monica Frawley. In Selina Cartmell’s uncompromising ensemble production, the relatively inexperienced cast perform with disarming confidence, feeding off the energy of the raucous punk soundtrack firing up the scene changes.
What should be a place of refuge from the pressures of the outside world becomes a melting pot of academic jousting, jealousy and confusion, with the ever-present spectre of bullying instilling a queasily dangerous edge. Leading the assault is Ian Toner’s braying, superior Bennett, who turns the full throttle of his cruelty onto, in turn, his nervy girlfriend Cissy (Aisha Fabienne Ross), the desperately insecure Tanya (Laura Smithers) and Rory Corcoran’s pathetic scholarship boy Chadwick.
But when Chadwick rises up and unleashes his dizzying intelligence on to Bennett's sexual ambiguity, the rapt audience responds with a burst of applause and cheering. Commendably, the actors keep faith with the spirit and accents of Stephens's native Stockport, a bourgeois Victorian town whose traditional values place unbearable strains upon its young citizens. Until September 6
