On paper it looks like a good idea: to celebrate its 50th anniversary the National Youth Theatre commissioned six writers to do plays about six decades. But, on the evidence of the first two, what you get is a thumbnail sketch of the period often stronger on mood-music and pop music, than character and ideas.
Rebecca Lenkiewicz's Blue Moon Over Poplar, set in the mid-1950s, seizes on one interesting fact: that this was an age of tribal Teddy Girls who imitated the accosting quiffs and drainpipes of the boys. By introducing a young Jamaican girl, Lenkiewicz also reminds us that racial tensions were just starting to surface. But the references to the hanging of Ruth Ellis are awkwardly interpolated and too many plot lines are undeveloped. What Lenkiewicz seems to be saying is that youth was starting to find its voice in the 1950s but was as screwed-up as ever: a point that emerges clearly, in Paul Roseby's production, from the performances of Laura Sykes as a lovelorn reject and Mark Finbow as a guy besotted with his twin sister.
The real problem with writing about the past is that you endow characters with historical foresight. Lenkiewicz's play ends with an ironic anticipation of Harold Macmillan's "most of our people have never had it so good": a sentence he didn't utter until 1957. And in Barrie Keeffe's Still Killing Time, set in the 1970s, several characters seem strangely aware of the good times ahead for spivvy entrepreneurs.
Otherwise this is Keeffe on home turf writing about the dashed hopes of East End school-leavers at the time of the 1977 Silver Jubilee. Keeffe captures accurately the anarchy of disaffected youth, articulated by the Sex Pistols, and the sexual timidity that underlay male bravado; well caught, in John Hoggarth's production, by the way Ciaran Owens's teenage bully-boy backs off when confronted by the slinky chic of Shakira Brooking's cafe-owner. Like Lenkiewicz's play, it's entertaining enough; but the 50-minute format means you get only a thin sliver, rather than a chunky slice, of period life.
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