The Fall opens with a glee club-style choir, stomping on stage and pumping out synchronised dance moves to the bubblegum pop of One Direction’s Live While We’re Young. It sets a deceptively upbeat tone to this short, sharp shock of a play on ageing and millennial angst. Though, even this early on, darkness lurks around the ensemble, from their rigid smiles to their identical grey T-shirts and trainers that might easily pass for prison regulation clothing.
The song’s lyrics, repeated between acts, take on ever-increasing notes of irony. The mood changes after a young, unnamed couple are stalled in their plans to have sex in a 92-year-old man’s house. “Old people, man, they’re fucking disgusting,” says one, and his spitting contempt later opens up to a more nuanced dialectic of anxiety and fear between cash-strapped millennials and their comparatively wealthy, ageing counterparts.
Who, the play asks, will bear the financial responsibility of care for the elderly when the young can barely afford to pay the rent? Each act moves further away from naturalism, giving way to a futuristic dystopia in which a ruthless solution has been found for the burden of the old.
James Fritz is a young, garlanded playwright whose work has examined the politics and poetry of millennial lives, from a 2014 Olivier-nominated play on online identities (Four Minutes Twelve Seconds) to the 2015 Bruntwood prize-winning drama on political activism (Parliament Square).
Like that previous work, The Fall plays games with time. Temporal jump-cuts are compressed into a few staccato sentences, such as when another unnamed couple progress in their relationship, from introductions to the mother-in-law – “Hello Jean”– to “I’m pregnant”, in moments. The 70-minute production takes us from youth to death, and the elderly characters we see in the final act may well be the young people we saw at the start.
It is slickly done; dialogue pulsates with energy and the cast give strong performances under the direction of Matt Harrison. The set is bold in its sparseness, with only the single, central prop of a bed – not one in the mould of Tracey Emin’s, which teems with the detritus of life – but a signifier of infirmity and oblivion. It is youth theatre at its most mature, and most dazzling.
- At Southwark Playhouse, London, until 19 May. Box office: 020-7407 0234.
