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by Simon Stephens, directed by Gregory Prest

The Howland Company, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto

April 3-14, 2018

Chadwick: “Human beings are pathetic...We could have made something really extraordinary and we won’t.”

Simon Stephens’s Punk Rock is a powerful, disturbing play about teenage life at an elite British grammar school.  Seven Sixth Form students preparing for their mock A-Level exams suffer under enormous pressure that is imposed on them from outside and that they impose on themselves and each other.  The strong performances from the entire cast under Gregory Prest’s insightful direction catches us up in an inexorably growing tension that we know will lead to catastrophe. 

Stephens’s 2009 play, now receiving its Toronto premiere, is divided into seven scenes, the seventh serving as a kind of epilogue to the previous six.  The setting is a seldom used library of a private grammar school in Stockport, a town near Manchester, England, based on Stockport Grammar, founded in 1487, the same school that Stephens himself attended.  We first meet Lilly Cahill (Ruth Goodwin), who is new to the school, and William Carlisle (Cameron Laurie), who has been there for five years.  William is helpful and welcoming to the seemingly shy Lilly and introduces her to the five denizens of this de facto private common room as they enter.  We, like Lilly, are rather overwhelmed by meeting so many people so quickly, but that confusion accurately mimics what happens to anyone on a first day at a new school.  We are glad that Lilly has the apparently calm and knowledgeable William to be her friend during her period of adjustment.

Stephens’s strategy with the following scenes is to demonstrate how our first impressions drawn from the first scene of both the characters and their situation are flawed.  By this means he shows how the teenagers also live in a world of flawed perceptions.  From the first scene we assume the play will be about how the newcomer Lilly comes to know or reject the denizens of the library.  In fact, the play turns out not to be so much about Lilly as how her arrival destabilizes an already combustible situation.  Lilly, who we had assumed was a withdrawn innocent turns out not to be innocent at all, finding a boyfriend within days of arriving and learning to betray words spoken in confidence just as the other teens do.

Meanwhile, we discover that William’s polite façade is one of many that he can assume.  We note that he keeps revising the facts of his biography in hopes that one of the personae he takes on will impress Lilly.  Gradually, we realize that the reason he has no friends within his little group is that they all know he is an inveterate liar.

While Williams obsessive pursuit of Lilly forms one strand of the play’s plot, bullying forms the other.  Every time they are in the same room together, the obnoxious Bennett Francis (James Graham) verbally and physically abuses the young genius Chadwick Meade (Andrew Pimento) for a host of complex reasons.  One reason is simply that Bennett is jealous of Chadwick’s genius and cosmic world view which Bennett clearly lacks.  Another is to impress on the others that he is the top dog of their little group.  Another is that Bennett may be secretly attracted to Chadwick but can only express his feelings in the form of aggression.  And yet another is that Chadwick does not to prevent Bennett’s attacks and makes himself an easy target.

As with the William-Lilly relationship, the Bennett-Chadwick relationship is not what it seems at first.  First, as most bullies are, Bennett is really a coward and only gets away with bullying Chadwick because the rest of the group does nothing to stop him or help Chadwick.  As a result, the entire group is implicated in what Bennett does.  Second, Chadwick gives into Bennett not because he is weak but because from his cosmic perspective he realizes that Bennett and what he does is utterly insignificant.

The action of the play the play shows how the William-Lilly plot strand gradually becomes entwined with the Bennett-Chadwick strand.  When the two plots link the result is explosive. 

It would be very easy to see the ultra-violent sixth scene of the play as its main point.  But as the existence of the reflective seventh scene should indicate, that is not the point.  What Stephens is examining is not violence but what leads to it.  The group of seven who meet in the library are linked by bonds of friendship and animosity.  Mostly, however, they are linked by a feeling of superiority to the other Sixth Form students. 

Worse than that, they are united by their hatred of the teenagers of the town either not in school or not in as prestigious a school as they are.  The group of seven thus form an elite within an elite.  Yet, rather than giving them pleasure at their innate superiority, the group is constantly plagued by the fear that they may fall from the elite into the ordinary.  Chadwick is extraordinary and is acknowledged as such by all.  Bennett’s bullying of him is his misguided attempt to make himself appear more extraordinary.  William’s eventual opposition to Bennett is his attempt to make himself even more extraordinary. 

By analyzing this select group at an elite school, Stephens is exposing, as do so many British plays, the rot that lies at the heart of the class system and how a sense of innate superiority in any group can lead to a sense of superiority to ordinary rules of law, behaviour and morals.

The cast, though obviously not aged 17, does an admirable job of  conveying the unpleasant mixture of fear and bravado that plagues extremely privileged teenagers.  Cameron Laurie, who gradually emerges as the play’s central character, perfectly captures William’s awkward, overabundant charm when he first meets Lilly.  As the action progresses we come to see how Laurie speaks his lines as if William is testing how far he can can go and still have others believe him.  His subsequent breakdowns are deliberately confusing both because we don’t know how much they are real and how much they are merely to win Lilly’s pity.  Laurie’s complex performance also suggests that they could be both.  What Laurie makes clear though all of William’s interactions is a desperate feeling of purposelessness that underpins the prestige he tries to win by creating new identities for himself.

Ruth Goodwin is excellent at presenting Lilly as an innocent.  In retrospect we can see that the hesitation in speaking Goodwin gives Lilly as is not necessarily to show Lilly’s shyness but to show how Lilly is coolly assessing her new environment.  Goodwin wins us over in the first scene so well as Lilly, that it is a major disappointment when we discover the real Lilly is just as corrupt as the others in the group in blabbing secrets to make themselves look good.  Nevertheless, Goodwin does suggest that Lilly has enough of a liking for William that she wants him to seek help when he seems to be in despair.

James Graham is so effective as the sociopath Bennett Francis that it is hard to separate the actor from the role.  Graham makes Bennett instantly dislikable through his ceaseless boasting and rudeness.  Graham has Bennett appear to light up at the sight of Chadwick since he now has his primary plaything with him.  How the others have come to tolerate Bennett’s tormenting of Chadwick only illustrates Edmund Burke’s maxim, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. 

Andrew Pimento gives an unusually powerful performance as Chadwick.  Pimento allows Chadwick to come off as the type of brainy nerd whose intelligence naturally makes others want to knock them down to size.  Yet, when we se what extreme humiliation Chadwick suffers at the hands of Bennett, Pimento makes us wonder whether this is a sign of giving in to the inevitable or a sign of masochism. 

If the other six students have too narrow a perspective on life, Chadwick’s is just the opposite.  As we discover, Chadwick places all human action within such an infinite universal context that he is able to endure Bennett’s tortures philosophically as nothing compared to the vastness of time and space.  In a fantastic speech that Pimento delivers with extraordinary power, Chadwick explains how the entire existence of humanity has been a failure and will end in an orgy of violence.  The fact that Stephens includes such a speech should indicate that this elite group of seven is meant at one level to represent a microcosm of all humanity.

If there is a failing with Stephens’s play it is that only these four characters are fully rounded and complex.  About the other three we know far too little.  All we know about Cissy is that she is somehow Bennett’s “girlfriend”, though each is willing to disparage the other, and that her mother will “literally murder” her if she doesn’t get straight As.  We know even less about Tanya except that she is overweight, wears makeup and has a crush on her English teacher.  About Nicholas all we know is that he plays sports and is Lilly’s boyfriend.  Given these tidbits of information, it is a great accomplishment that Hallie Seline as Cissy, Kristen Zaza as Tanya and Tim Dowler-Coltman as Nicholas make their characters stand out as much as they do. 

The seven students live near Manchester, are all trying to get into Oxford or Cambridge, are working on their A-Levels and speak of visiting medieval chapels.  All this would make sense if the actors used British accents.  The play’s critique of the class system would also be more clearly emphasized since class is in Britain is signalled so strongly by how one speaks.  Yet, Prest’s having his cast use Canadian accents is understandable, even if the British references jar, since it makes the play more relatable to a Canadian audience and its universal concerns shine more clearly.  All in all, Punk Rock is a shattering evening of theatre you will not soon forget.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive

Photo: (from top) Cameron Laurie as William and Ruth Goodwin as Lilly; James Graham as Bennett, Kristen Zaza as Tanya and Andrew Pimento as Chadwick. ©2018 Neil Silcox.

For tickets, visit www.crowstheatre.com.