Gig review: Occupy Meadows/Love Bites

By Joyce McMillan
Published on 20/06/2012 02:52

IF YOU want to glimpse a model of youth theatre that really works then you could do much worse than catch up with the Edinburgh-based group Strangetown, famous for working with new plays by young playwrights who know the group well.

Occupy Meadows/Love Bites

Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh

***

So in this current double bill, Strangetown’s 15-18 group perform two new plays set in Edinburgh on a midsummer night. Sam Siggs’s Love Bites – beautifully choreographed by director Ruth Hollyman – is a variation on the theme of love and how human beings mess it up, filtered through a conversation on a park bench between a stray Edinburgh teenager (male) and a gorgeous young teenage Cupid (female). There’s plenty of comedy here, some tremendously confident acting, and the occasional real touch of pathos.

Alan Gordon’s Occupy Meadows, by contrast, is a much bigger play that almost collapses under the weight of its own ambition, which involves creating 24 distinct teenage characters over 80 minutes, and weaving their stories into a fragmented, interlinked tragedy played out over one long evening on the Meadows.

The play is sometimes difficult to take in its portrayal of a lost, cynical and negative younger generation interested only in getting drunk or drugged-up. It’s also written almost entirely in an agonising teenage text-speak, funny only for the first ten minutes.

In the end, though – even while the pace often sags – it’s hard not to be impressed by the boldness of the play, its sense of tragedy, and its movingly political conclusion; as the kids gather their moral resources, and rouse themselves to protest at last.