When adults and teenagers are present together, it is the adults who tend to hold and dominate the space. Not with Company Three (formerly known as Islington Community Theatre), whose wonderful Brainstorm played two successful runs at the National Theatre’s Temporary Space. The young performers hold the room with stories and experiences excavated from their own lives and experiences; they let us peep inside their heads and see their hidden dreams and fears.
This latest piece, made in just three weeks since their last GCSE exam, gives us six 16-year-olds thinking about the future. The big global questions – will the human race survive? Can global warming be solved? – come muddled in with the small, but no less pressing ones: will I get an A in French? Will my little sister grow taller than me? Beginning with a clever litany when what appears to be a pre-show announcement gradually turns into a litany of the petty school regulations that these youngsters are escaping as they head for college, the show sees the six struggling to flee individual cells within a cardboard cube that represents a prison, a playground and the obstacle course of life.
This show is much more rough and ready than Brainstorm, but it has the same exuberant energy and unfettered honesty, and the beauty of it is that because it’s about the future, it will constantly grow and change, rolling out towards horizons yet unseen and unimagined.
• At Yard theatre, London, until 23 July. Box office: 020-7100 1975.
