Plays for Young People  

Published by Methuen Drama

Want more drama diversity? Four plays to consider. We now live in diverse, multicultural communities and need plays which reflect that to use in drama and English lessons. That is why Pearson Edexel, the UK’s largest examining body, has spent five years committedly looking for ways of expanding the list of specified texts for GCSE drama to include plays by global majority playwrights.

GCSE specifications always require students to study some pre-20th century work, so two of Pearson’s four new plays tick that box. All are now published by Methuen Drama in its Plays for Young People series.

Sophocles, Antigone

adapted by Roy Williams

First staged in 2014 – co production between Derby Theatre, Pilot Theatre and Theatre Royal Stratford East before a national tour – Roy Williams reworks Antigone in a modern settling with military rule, traffic, menacing lights and all the fears of inner city life. Tig’s rule-defying brother has died and Creo, who owns a nightclub and rules the roost will not allow her to bury him decently. Of course she becomes defiant and, of course, it doesn’t end happily although Williams changes Sophocles’ ending. Williams’ dialogue is snappy, streetwise and totally convincing. There are eight good parts in this play plus chorus – effectively an ensemble.

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House

adapted by Tanika Gupta

Well, of course – Ibsen’s denials notwithstanding – A Doll’s House was a startling, forward looking “feminist” play even when it premiered in Copenhagen in 1879. It explores repression within marriage. Gupta’s version, first seen at Lyric Hammersmith, moves it to colonial India and presents Niru, a young Bengali woman married to Tom who is an English colonial bureaucrat and regards her as his plaything. It actually works very well and is as topical as ever although it’s set in the past because it explores in depth issues such as colonialism and racism. There are six roles and lots of scope for some detailed voice work – both the Indian and English accents of the period. I think this is the best of these four plays.

Gone Too Far!

By Bola Agbaje

Premiered at the Royal Court in 2007, this sharply observed play is set on a London housing estate where issues of identity and culture dominate every word, deed and action from the moment where two brothers, from different continents, pop along the street to buy a pint of milk onwards. The tensions, occasional humour and real dangers are deftly caught. The girls, Paris and Armani are particularly interesting, and I really liked the discussion which is built very undidactic into the text. Respect is what everyone wants and demands but what do we mean by it and how is it earned? There are twelve parts for people of varying ages and needing actors from different backgrounds – obviously.

This play was written for National Theatre Connections so potentially it has a big cast (nine plus a large-as-you-like ensemble who also play small roles). The production of it by Jackson’s Lane Transmission youth theatre was invited to National Theatre’s Dorfman Theatre as part of the 2018 festival. The setting is more or less the present and we begin and end in tyrannical, propaganda-infested North Korea, where a delightfully mixed group of nine teenagers, are for different reasons, trying to escape by a circuitous route to the south amidst dangers, fears and horrors. Inspired by accounts of the Laos 9 and other true child refugee stories, the play reflects the playwright’s own gratitude that she arrived in Britain with nothing as a child herself and was shown compassion and given opportunities. The playwright asserts that professional productions must use south Asian actors but that for amateur/youth productions she simply wants people to inhabit the roles imaginatively because they’re not depriving south Asian actors of work.

Review by Susan Elkin