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Fiona Mountford's rating
Inside the mind of a teenager who killed
By
Fiona Mountford
25 Oct 2007
Here's a thought-provoking outing for older kids this half-term and even older kids when school is back. Looking for JJ, Anne Cassidy's award-winning novel for teenagers, has been niftily adapted by director Marcus Romer for a gripping 90-minute upsetting of any received views about a child who kills one of her peers.
The only shocking thing about 17-year-old Alice is her ordinariness. But one moment of madness six years previously means a life forever defined, lived in concealment and fear of a bloodhound tabloid press.
The terrific Christina Baily shows Alice in turn as genial and haunted, open and closed, as we see her preparing for university and then as she was at the age of 10, a frightened little girl desperate for affection from a feckless mother. There but for the grace of God, says Cassidy in a manner certain to make the "lock 'em up" brigade bristle, go we all.
Anyone convinced that theatre is for the terminally unhip should take a look at all the gizmos they've got onstage in Water (at the Lyric Hammersmith). Its creators, upcoming multimedia collective Filter, believe in letting an audience watch the genesis of aural and visual effects but also, hearteningly, never forget that people pay to be told a story. In fact, there are so many stories struggling for stage time here that some are in need of water wings.
The basic premise, which director David Farr highlights neatly, is the difficulty we have in connecting with each other. Various ambitious, busy, technologically savvy young people are shown leading fractured lives to prove the thesis, but over all this, like an acid rain cloud, hangs the awkwardly unintegrated Big Theme of global warming. This Water should have been filtered more carefully.
• Until 25 Nov (020 7645 0560, www.unicorntheatre.com).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Reader views (1)
I saw this in Portsmouth a week or so ago. I agree with Fiona Mountford that Christina Baily gives an outstanding performance. The enactment highlighted the difficulty of transferring a novel to the stage, given that we see Alice as a 10 year old and a 16 year old or so teenager in the same breath. It was fast and furious, it moved like an express train, but given he subject matter it lacked any real dramatic tension. I did not know the true story that the novel and the play depict. And in some way because it was a 10-year-old killing a friend, there is even less dramatic tension because it had to be, as indeed it was, an act of rage and fury, without the poor girl knowing why she did it. I think if the story had been told when Alice was much older, married say, with more of a life to draw upon, I for one would have been more interested. Nevertheless for all that a brave and courageous attempt to stage something that is not easy to stage. So full marks to the writer/ director. It's just that I felt strangely empty afterwards, as if I had witnessed a lot of words without them really totalling very much at all.
- Roger Goldsmith, Southsea, Hampshire, 26/10/2007 11:40
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