FOR US (Future Voices/Southwark Playhouse)

 

By Aashiq

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaV2TOAyeog&feature=emb_logo

Available until: Unknown

These students are so talented! I could almost have a fit of jealousy and refuse not to review anymore, but I’m trying to be more mature and I don’t think that would really qualify.

For Us is written by Funke Telefusi. It’s the story of a sixteen year old girl called Elizabeth. Elizabeth lives with her mother, who is dealing with her very difficult past (which I’m not going to tell you about – you’ll have to watch it and see!). Elizabeth feels unhappy and uncomfortable and unable to cope. So she reaches out for help.

This is a really emotional story! Funke is really good at filling her audience with emotional pain and then kind of giving a sharp twist that really got to me and made me really need a hug. There’s so much sadness in this play. A real impossible situation and no obvious way out of it and even though I was just being a totally normal audience member, it was difficult to watch what was happening and do nothing.

Funke also used some interesting narrative techniques which might have been frustrating in a different story, but this worked. There was a scene with a phone call. Only one character was visible. She asked questions, then there was a silence while she listened to an inaudible reply. The character then repeats the reply back to the caller. This works firstly because it’s realistic for a person in that situation to repeat what was said and secondly because the moments of silence, of waiting so long to find out the substance of the reply create a scary feeling of suspense.

Maybe sometimes there was a feeling that some of the scenes were cut off too soon and finished too abruptly, but maybe it’s just that Funke left me wanting to know more – or maybe it was more clever writing, designed to make me feel worried about what happened after the screen faded to black, cutting me off as some of the phone calls were cut off.

The characters were really good. Elizabeth (Isabella Pappas) is caught halfway between teenage hormones and the feeling that she needs to be an adult and make a change. (That is literally me every day, I don’t think I’ll ever grow out of these hormone things.) Her mother (Georgia Goodman) is all sharp edges and harsh words but very vulnerable at the same time. The relationship is paralleled by two other characters – a more experienced worker, also played by Georgia, advising the less experienced Taj Atwal. They all perform their roles well and they really make Funke’s dramatic decisions work. (I do love dramatic decisions.)

Director Grace Gibson creates a good sense of place which makes the play even more real – the office looks like a real office and I completely believed Elizabeth and her mother were in the same house. It all felt so real.

Another really good play, but it’s so typical that really good schemes like this don’t start up till I’m too old for them. It seems like a really good experience for young writers and it shows the level of commitment that they’re still putting these plays on even when they can’t use their theatre.