Salford Arts Theatre
This year’s Greater Manchester Fringe runs from 1st-30th September, and I’m reviewing a selection of the shows on this year’s programme for this blog and for North Manchester FM. My second show of this year’s festival was on Saturday 11th September, when I was at the Salford Arts Theatre to see Libby Hall’s play Your Playground Voice is Gone. The radio version of this review will be going out on the Hannah’s Bookshelf GM Fringe Reviews Special on North Manchester FM on Tuesday 14th September. But here’s the blog version…
Your Playground Voice is Gone is a one-act play, written by Libby Hall and directed by Roni Ellis, and performed by the Salford Arts Theatre Young Performers Company. At the last Greater Manchester Fringe Festival, I reviewed Hall’s play The Melting of a Single Snowflake, which was also performed by the Young Performers Company, so I was interested to see what this new piece would be like.
In some ways, Your Playground Voice is Gone bears some similarities to The Melting of a Single Snowflake. It’s an ensemble piece with a single set, which uses the dialogue and conversations between an eclectic group of young people to develop its plot. Like Hall’s earlier play, Your Playground Voice is Gone explores themes of youth, identity and change. However, for all the superficial similarities, Your Playground Voice is Gone offers a quite different story – with a different sort of conclusion – to The Melting of a Single Snowflake, and it is thought-provoking in the way it does this.
The play opens on its single set – a fly-tip in some woodlands that is clearly acting as a makeshift den. John (played by Matthew Cox) and Rachel (Molly Edwards) rush onto stage as though fleeing something, and then proceed to wipe something red from their hands and t-shirts. They’re soon joined by Holly (Leia Komorowska) who is wearing school uniform, carrying what appears to be homework, and studiously ignoring the still-panicky behaviour of her peers.
Although they are clearly around the same age, the contrast between the characters is strikingly apparent even before the dialogue begins. While Komorowska’s Holly holds herself with the confident poise of a serious young woman, John’s youthful fragility is almost tangible. Sitting at the front of the stage in a near-constant state of bewilderment, Cox’s performance conveys both naïvety and fear of the adult world. In between these two is Edwards’s Rachel, who veers dramatically between maturity – there’s a touching maternal quality to the ways she helps John to wipe his hands – and vulnerability – she often flinches away, holding herself more like a frightened child than a confident adolescent.
These contrasts are heightened by the arrival of the rest of the cast. We meet Darcy (played by Scarlett Doyle), a rambunctious and flippant would-be rounders star in a bandana and camouflage jacket, Kelsey (played by Sienna Kavanagh), a more ‘girly’ girl who is wearing a rather misjudged face of makeup, Loz (played by Josie Leigh), who seems determined to criticize and question everything her friends do, and Alfie (Riley McCaffery), who confidently explains why his playground voice has gone early on with a rather blunt anatomical boast (which his friends don’t believe).
Although there is some movement around the stage, Your Playground Voice is Gone is carried almost entirely through the dialogue between the seven characters. There’s a healthy dose of light-hearted bickering and mockery, but also some serious conversation about (amongst other things) the physical abuse John is enduring at the hands of his mother, and the various ambitions each of the group have for when they’re ‘grown up’. As in her earlier play, Hall reveals a good ear for dialogue and a talent for writing humour. A highlight for me was Alfie’s confident assertion that his father is a self-employed gardener, because he grows plants in his house and then sells them on to his customers.
While the conversation ranges around from Kelsey’s conviction that she won’t grow old because she uses Nivea, to Holly’s insistence that she takes her schoolwork much more seriously than any of her peers, to Darcy’s casual announcement that she’s been diagnosed with ADHD (a fact that elicits sympathy from John, despite him not knowing what the condition is or how it might affect her), there is a thread that runs through, which will ultimately lead us to some unsettling revelations.
Throughout their chatter, the young characters keep returning to a sense of confusion between the child and adult worlds. This isn’t so much a play about the transitional nature of adolescence – as The Melting of a Single Snowflake was – but rather one that explores the sharp disjunctions that one experiences during that time of life. Rather than navigating a change from youth to maturity, the characters here are working through confusion and contradictions.
And these confusions and contradictions come thick and fast. For instance, while Alfie sees his father’s exploits through a lens of childlike naivety, he is able to look at the relationship between Holly and her teacher with more adult eyes. Darcy, who is the most playful and childlike in her actions throughout, seems to be the most knowing and worldly wide (though she mostly uses this knowledge to tease her more naïve peers).
While the performances are engaging and funny, and the jokes all land well, the real strength of Your Playground Voice is Gone lies in the storytelling. The conversations between the young people aren’t simply a meditation on the fractured and contradictory nature of adolescence, but rather a slow (and sometimes imperceptible) revelation of the underlying plot – which has, in fact, happened off-stage before the play began.
Hall’s storytelling here is even more ambitious than in The Melting of a Single Snowflake, as the story being told is not the one we might have expected. Throwaway comments and jokes early on – including some seemingly glib lines from Alfie – eventually turn out to be the heart of the piece. This is not a story about growing up in the general sense, but rather a tale with a much darker heart. This is carried through a mostly static seven-way conversation, but it still packs a punch when it is revealed.
The play’s ending is one that will stick with you, and it actively encourages the audience to ponder on its implications after the curtain has come down. For younger viewers, there are some clear and unequivocal messages about safety and boundaries, but for older audience members (like myself) the message is more troubling. As with Hall’s earlier play, the lack of a strong and supportive adult presence in these young people’s lives is felt keenly – from John’s abusive mother to Alfie’s ‘gardener’ father, the adults on the periphery of this story are unreliable at best, harmful at worst. The question is thus raised: can we really judge young people for finding their own solutions to problems if they have no adults to turn to for help?
In addition to this, the play’s ending is somewhat open. Everything is revealed through the words of a group of young people who veer wildly between childhood and maturity, and so we can never be completely assured of how they are comprehending things. Even when some apparently clear and unequivocal exposition is given, it is undercut by Rachel’s unsophisticated insistence that £72.11 is probably enough money for seven people to live on indefinitely. The open ending ensures that the audience is left wondering what will happen after the curtain comes down, but it also leaves some uncomfortable questions about what happened before it came up.
Overall, this is a compelling piece of theatre. The Young Performers Company offer some assured performances, handling both the humour and the darkness with confidence. Hall’s writing is sophisticated and controlled, with the story developing at a pace that makes clever use of the constraints of form and setting. Although the play is a single 50-minute act, it feels like there is much more here, and that the story is much deeper and longer.
After reviewing both The Melting of a Single Snowflake and Your Playground Voice is Gone, I am impressed with the Salford Arts Theatre Young Performers Company, and I’m also convinced we’re going to be seeing much more from writer Libby Hall in the future.
Your Playground Voice is Gone was on at the Salford Arts Theatre, on 11th-12th September, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe. To see the full programme for this year’s GM Fringe, visit the festival website.
