By Aashiq
Link: https://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/future-voices
Available until: Unknown
On a surface level, this is an
enjoyable play which a lot of people can identify with. Although it is about
adolescents taking exams and we tend not to do that anymore after we finish our
education, I’m sure it’s something everyone from (currently) Year 13 and older
remembers and there are other aspects of the play that don’t go away just
because we’re grown up.
This play seems particularly relevant now. It shows students sitting exams in 2020. My immediate thought was (and this is not a criticism of the play, I am going somewhere with this thought) that this didn’t happen in 2020. It also won’t happen in 2021. This means all the things that happen leading up to the exams become even more important. The work the students did and the way they approached it. The way they’re expected to cope in their exams.
And just as I was having that thought,
wondering how the kids had approached their exams and what was likely to happen
if they hadn’t been able to sit the exams as planned, we got a flashback. I do
like it when plays do exactly what I want. They never usually do that. It
always turns out that the guy I really fancy isn’t gay. (Yes, all right. He’s a
fictional character, I can’t have him in real life, I can have him in my
imagination no matter what his orientation is. But we’re not talking about me.)
In the flashback, we see the students two years in the past. And then again on
their very first day of secondary school.
Even in short flashbacks, we can see
how much the moments we see contribute to the exams. The students don’t change.
They have the same problems in both the flashbacks to the past and in the
present. The same personalities. It’s very realistic. There are some kids who
go downhill or uphill, but a lot of them stay the same. It shows the real-life
teachers are well-placed to predict the grades for the real-life students and
that is reassuring.
But this play also show where the
teachers fail. The ‘evil’ twin who gets blamed for what the good twin does
(though I’d be twice as evil if my parents had called me that, I wouldn’t
even use it for my drag queen name!). The girl who clearly has deep emotional
problems but is more or less ignored (I don’t usually talk about the actors
because this is all about the writers, but Isabella Pappas is a serious talent).
The girl who acts like she doesn’t care… but does she really feel that way? The
girl who seems to be totally with it and knows exactly what is going on, but to
what extent has she developed the ability to relate to others?
One of the most annoying (and, okay,
yes, devastating) things as a writer is when people read or watch your stuff
and then they tell you what it’s about and they get it completely wrong. If the
writer reads this and I’ve got it totally wrong, IGNORE ME. People ignore me
all the time and it doesn’t seem to do them any harm.
But on the positive side, even though
I might have got it completely wrong (and even if I haven’t got it wrong, then
I’m wrong about being wrong, there’s no escape from wrongness), writer Samantha
Itaifo has written a play which has really made me think. It’s made me think
about the current situation. It’s made me think about the education system.
It’s made me think about the Government (okay, maybe I didn’t need to be
reminded of that). It’s also made me care about every single student who
featured in the play and to think of the real students, some of whom will be
very like the people in the play.
It’s annoying when people think the
wrong things, but if you’ve written a play and you’re making people think and
feel and relate it to real life, your writing has serious power and that means
you have done something very, very right.
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