Theatre review: Our Generation

While we don't currently have the mass cancellations we were seeing at the height of Omicron, some shows are still being more affected by Covid than others: The performance of Our Generation I'd originally booked for last month got cancelled - by this point it had become apparent it was nearly four hours long, so to be honest I didn't mind the opportunity to reschedule from a Tuesday night to a weekend - and tonight's almost went the same way, as two cast members had had positive test results and the Dorfman doesn't carry understudies. Fortunately two of their castmates were able to read in all their roles as well as playing their own, so Sarita Gabony covered Anna Burnett's part and Stephanie Street read in Debbie Chazen's tonight. And I'm glad they did, as despite its epic length it would have been a shame to miss Alecky Blythe's epic of five years in the lives of teenagers, her most significant and affecting work since London Road.

As with all Blythe's plays this is a verbatim piece, with the playwright and a team of collaborators recording interviews, then piecing together the play out of direct quotes, right down to dialect, accents, verbal tics, umms and ahhs.

Although there is quite a large cast of characters as usual, this time Blythe focused particularly on 12 young people, following their progress in what turned out to be the momentous years from 2016 to 2020. And there's some significant personal ups and downs as well in a varied group, some of whom have more advantages in life than others, most of them going through obnoxious phases, all of them coming across as essentially decent and likeable. They include Ierum (Rachelle Diedericks,) whose religious parents won't let her have a smart phone, and who finds it hard to break into a social circle at school as a result; Callum (Conor Gormally,) an unlikely Northern Irish Tory Boy who'd be interested in wrestling if it wasn't for the pain; and Taylor (Callum Mardy,) who's hoping for a spot at the Paralympics, but has to decide whether to focus on wheelchair basketball or shot put.

Some have had a harder start than others: Annabella's (Alex Jarrett) relationship with her mother is so complicated she has to spend some of her time in care, and sweet, well-adjusted siblings Ali (Gavi Singh Chera) and Ayesha (Anushka Chakravarti) have to deal with a devastating event in their family. Most obviously up against it is Gabony's Mia, who starts the play with her father in prison, and knows she has an uphill battle to avoid getting into a cycle of abusive relationships with similar men.

This being a verbatim play there's no overt editorialisation of how class and background affect the kids' experiences and prospects, but as we follow them it's hard not to notice that while many of them have to take on jobs and other responsibilities as they get older, public school kids Lucas (Joe Bolland) and Emily's (Poppy Shepherd) concerns largely continue to centre around their grades, boyfriends and girlfriends, and whether they'll be made Head Boy and Girl (they both are.) They remain likeable enough, and aware that they've got a degree of privilege, and even so Lucas eventually reveals his mental health has suffered from the pressure to live up to his high-achieving brothers.

For Zac (Dee Ahluwalia,) the stress is something he manages to hide quite well until it starts to cause extreme physical symptoms, including his hair falling out in clumps. Meanwhile, perhaps the most unexpectedly heartwarming story comes from teen tearaway Luan (Hélder Fernandes,) whose parents fled the Yugoslavian wars in the nineties, and are quietly despairing at his academic failure - he makes no effort because he's so convinced his sports prowess will see him through. His cockiness actually turns out to be justified, and not only is he considered for the Kosovan national basketball team, but when he gets a sports scholarship to a school a long way from his friends and bad influences, he actually finds a rekindled interest in his academic subjects as well.

The cast of Daniel Evans' production is rounded out by Hasan Dixon, whose various dads and teachers get some of the best drily comic lines. And as usual the vast amount of material Blythe has collected means that there's a lot of great off-the-cuff comic lines to throw into the script ("Can you open this for me? My nails are longer than my future.") And the show's length makes sense in context, as the second interval comes pretty much dead on the three-hour mark, with the kids making plans for their futures, only for them to be revealed in a tableau wearing surgical masks: To all intents and purposes Our Generation is a three-hour play ending in spring 2020, which for obvious reasons then couldn't drop the story there.

So we get the added frustrations of getting locked away in their homes, for some of them with too many family members to be able to follow their online classes properly. For many of them a disease that initially targets the elderly brings a focus to some of the anger that's already been expressed around Brexit and Trump, making them wonder why they should bother following the rules in their prime: Why give up their present, to protect people who voted for them not to have a future? For others the risks are more direct - over the course of the story, both Ali and Ayesha's little sister, and Callum himself, develop medical issues that leave them in the vulnerable category. Ultimately Our Generation is impossible to summarise because it gives such a broad, kaleidoscopic view of a generation's lives, concerns and attitudes. But it proves well worth the time it demands, a funny, heartbreaking and uplifting experience.

Our Generation by Alecky Blythe is booking until the 9th of April at the National Theatre's Dorfman; and from the 22nd of April to the 14th of May at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester.

Running time: 3 hours 45 minutes including two intervals.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.