Playhouse, Edinburgh, 22 August 2008

Simone James in 365

HAVING OPENED at Eden Court in Inverness before its high-profile run in the Edinburgh International Festival and subsequent dates in London, there was a tremendous amount riding on this production by the National Theatre of Scotland.

Staged by artistic director Vicky Featherstone and scripted by David Harrower, whose Blackbird is in line to be made into a film, 365 is a worthy attempt to draw attention to the 6000 or so young people who leave state care every year in the UK. Unfortunately, a collaborative creative process in which the script was written during rehearsals has led to a muddled production that communicates little sense of why we should take the matter seriously.

Part of the problem is they have made a big show from something small and intimate. Set in a practice flat, where teenagers prepare for their independence, the show offers fragmented narratives that illustrate the psychological challenges of being brought up without a conventional family.

But the vast Edinburgh Playhouse is no place for such delicate stories, and individual speeches that would have great power in a studio theatre seem lost here. It’s hard to express loneliness and vulnerability when half the audience can’t even make out your face.

The expensive-looking stage tricks introduced by Featherstone are an attempt to give a poetic dimension to the collage of stories, at the same time as bowing to the demands of a large stage. The danger is they look gratuitous if we haven’t already engaged in the emotional lives of the characters.

The shame is that there is an interesting theme trying to emerge from the confusion. In Blackbird, Harrower brought together two people who had been damaged and defined by an illegal sexual relationship many years before. They need to confront each other in order to make sense of the fractured narrative of their lives.

There is a similar narrative uncertainty in the lives of people in care. For those of us fortunate enough to have grown up in a stable home, the story of our life is retold in shared memories, family anecdotes and photograph albums. For young people in care, there is no equivalent, making their very identity insecure.

In 365, Harrower shows us a teenager who asks to see the official records relating to his life only to discover that three years are missing, like chapters torn from his biography, leaving him with an incomplete sense of who he is.

It is much like the girl desperate to find out what happened when, as a four-year-old, her mother left her alone in a locked house for five days before she was taken into care. Without this detail she feels unresolved. Another girl regards every word of the social workers as a trap to steal her story from her.

Theatre should be a perfect place to discuss such narrative dislocations but the structure of 365 doesn’t allow Harrower to pursue the theme. The result is a busy but emotionally flat performance that, oddly, fails to persuade us that anything is wrong with the care system.

© Mark Fisher, 2008

Links

• National Theatre of Scotland
• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog