CityLife

Punk spirit in Exchange's new run

Tom Sturridge, Henry Lloyd-Hughes and Sophie Wu in Punk Rock

WHEN Punk Rock, the brilliant new play from Stockport-born Simon Stephens, cannons into the Royal Exchange from Wednesday, you’ll be treated to a volatile and quite shocking experience, revealing the brutality and disillusion within a Stockport grammar school.

Following Simon’s M.E.N. Theatre Award-winning triumph On The Shore Of The Wide World, Punk Rock follows a group of educated and articulate young people, who are a world away from the distorted visions of rampaging hoodies of the tabloids’ fevered imaginings.

But these are still young people with problems and anxieties.

As exams loom, sexual tension and simmering violence rise to dangerous levels, come to boiling point, with a finale that could almost, as the old cliche would have it, have been torn from today’s headlines!

It’s an extraordinarily powerful and moving piece of writing in which Stephens, indisputably one of the most exciting writers in the country, returns again to his theme of the childish way we treat our children, as previously seen in Port, Herons and On The Shore Of The Wide World. Simon admits that he is ‘drawn to writing and writing again and again about our young’.

“My own experiences as a schoolteacher in Dagenham continue to sit with me.

“More profoundly, I’ve been affected by my own experiences as a father of three theree children and I return again and again in my imagination to their futures.

“I mull on the traumas they may experience and the loss as a means of making sense of myself and my own childhood.

“But there is another reason. The British treat their children badly. We marginalise them. We distrust them. We cross the road to avoid them. We fear them.

“Moral panics about teenage knife crime or gun handling, teenage sexuality and teenage pregnancy or childhood obesity, have all escalated in the past few years.

“But in a report into the wellbeing of children in 29 countries, published by York University just a few months ago, British children were ranked 24th!
 
Romania

“Only children in Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Malta came lower than the UK when their wellbeing was considered in terms of their health, their relationships, their material resources, their behaviour, their education and their housing.

“As a teacher and a parent, living in a country that treats its children so appallingly affects me.

"As a writer it motivates me to write. I think that, as a writer, I have a commitment to investigate this flaw, to exploring this rupture.”

Burning commitment

Beyond that burning commitment, Simon believes that ‘it is possible to make these explorations with young actors and with young people’s theatre, which, in the UK, is often marginalised or considered an inferior part of an adult art form’.

“When the young are invited to the theatre it is often done in a way that is patronising and tokenistic. Young people in theatre in the UK are thought of in much the same way as young people in restaurants are.
“We understand that it might be useful or appropriate that they are there, but really we wish they weren’t and we’re annoyed with them.

“When I was resident dramatist at the Royal Court in London, I remember being surprised that many of the plays I read featured children but that nearly all of the children, dramatised by sometimes very fine writers, either spoke very little, spoke very badly or remained silent throughout.

“It was as though the writers of those plays either didn’t know the voices of the characters they were writing, or they didn’t trust young actors to carry those voices.

“I wanted to write a play that could be performed by teenage actors but which was as complicated and as adult and as challenging as I could make it.”

Punk Rock is at the Royal Exchange from Wednesday, October 7 until Saturday, October 31. Call 0161 833 9833.