There’s no way this many teenagers have this little spirit. We Are Not Finished is a manifesto of these young people’s values and their demands for the future, but the verve and fight of the 13-strong cast, aged 11-17, seems to be muted by a theatrical frame that doesn’t do them justice. Or maybe this is the futility teenagers feel in 2021, contemplating a burning world severed by divisions.
Brought together by theatre/dance company Fevered Sleep, its directors David Harradine and Sam Butler worked with a group of untrained, opinionated young Londoners to devise the performance. On the back wall is a photo of a teeth-baring wolf squaring up to a bear; the stage is a white ramp like an endangered glacier. Under cold flickering lights and variously silence, tense soundscore or apocalyptic rumbles, the young people deliver a series of statements.
They want to vote, to be seen, to have agency, to feel free – evergreen teenage demands. They’re against discrimination and climate change; they’re for better pay for nurses and leaders who don’t lie. You can’t argue with that, but the mood of po-faced anger sees the spark of activism snuffed out. If all teens feel this defeated, well that’s terrifying. Harking back to childhood comforts – “I used to think you would save me,” one says – that hurts.
The young performers acquit themselves well, but what this show needed from its directors was a stronger arc, a harnessing and releasing of the energy gathered on the stage. There are lines that do lunge at the audience of adults. “Why do you pretend not to see what’s happening? Why has there not been a revolution? Why have you lost hope?!” And perhaps the measured tone is intentional, against stereotypes of unruly youthful hysteria. But the text lacks the detail to bring their voices alive.
At least, that is, until the scene where they imagine their happy place, complete with coloured eyeliner, cats and dogs, a patch of flowers on an east London walk. With this looser, improvisatory feel, we finally get closer to the performers’ real selves. One boy poetically finds “freckles of hope and love” in the bleak landscape and then you think there might be a future for us after all.
At the Place, London, until 13 November
