Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Hearing Young Voices on the London Stage: `Shit Bein' Seventeen Int it? Never Take Us Serious'

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10486801.2012.690743

1477-2264

Maggie Inchley,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Peter Billingham, At the Sharp End (London: Methuen, 2007), pp. 241–42. Benedict Nightingale, ‘Review of Burn, Chatroom, Citizenship’, The Times, 17 March 2006, in Theatre Record, 26 (2006), 297–300 (p. 298). Jeremy Weller, ‘A Play for Today’, Imagine (BBC One), 31 October 2006. Office for National Statistics, Labour Market Statistics: October 2011, 12 October 2011, [accessed 11 November 2011]. Barnardo's, ‘Scandal of Britons Who Have Given Up on Children’, 3 November 2011, [accessed 11 November 2011]. Jill Lawless, ‘Being a Youth in Britain Isn't So Easy These Days’, New York Times, 20 March 2007, [accessed 13 February 2010]. Charles R. Acland, Youth, Murder, Spectacle: The Cultural Politics of ‘Youth in Crisis’ (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1995), p. 9. Christie L. Barron, Giving Youth a Voice: A Basis for Rethinking Adolescent Violence (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2000), p. 10. Peter Trudgill, Dialects of English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 126. Linguist David Crystal describes the popularly made link between linguistic and behavioural standards, particularly in the 1980s. David Crystal, ‘Plato's Problem, Linguistic, Split Infinitives’, in Linguistics, Language Acquisition, and Language Variation: Current Trends and Future Prospects, ed. by James E. Alatis et al. (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1996), pp. 5–29 (p. 8). Leo Butler, Redundant (London: Methuen, 2001), p. 12. Helen Nicholson, Theatre, Education and Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 210–11. Kate Dorney, The Changing Language of Modern English Drama, 1945–2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 221. Simon Bent, Bottle Universe (London: The Bush Theatre, 2005), p. 79. David Greig's Yellow Moon was produced at the Traverse in 2006 and toured nationally. Paul Roseby, ‘Introduction’, in White Boy, Tanika Gupta (London: Oberon, 2008), p. 5. Roy Williams's plays Clubland (2001) and Fallout (2003), and Bola Agbaje's Gone Too Far (2007), were amongst the plays programmed at the Royal Court in this period whose characters use black or urban street dialects. Tanika Gupta, White Boy (London: Oberon, 2008), p. 39. Further references will be given in the text. The article itself dealt with the collaborative rehearsal process and the contribution of young people to the making of the play. Alison Roberts, ‘London's Teenage Crisis’, Evening Standard, 7 August 2007, [accessed 29 October 2008]. Paul Gilroy coins this term in After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), p. 95. In their work on Williams, Barry and Boles noted that youth culture was now ‘identified with black youth’. Elizabeth Barry and William Boles, ‘Beyond Victimhood: Agency and Identity in the Theatre of Roy Williams’, in Alternatives within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatres, ed. by Dimple Godiwala (Newcastle: Cambridge Schools Press, 2006), pp. 297–313 (p. 299). Nicholas de Jongh, ‘NYT: Generation I. D: White Boy’, Evening Standard, 14 August 2007, [accessed 17 April 2012]. Performance of White Boy, Soho Theatre, 1 September 2007. Gupta, in Roberts, ‘London's Teenage Crisis’. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Every Day Life (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), p. 253. Weller, ‘A Play for Today’. See Philip Auslander, From Acting to Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 29–30. Stacey Duncan, ‘Language and Identity in Youth Culture’, in Contemporary Youth Culture: An International Encyclopaedia, ed. by Priya Parmar, Birgit Richard and Shirley Steinberg (West Port, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2006), pp. 37–41 (p. 39). Further discussion of the sociolinguistics of the interracial urban voice is provided in Melanie E. Bush, ‘Hip Hop, Wiggahs and Whiteness’, in Contemporary Youth Culture, pp. 365–69 (p. 369); Ben Rampton, Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents (Manchester: St Jerome, 2005), pp. 2, 73. ‘Tanika Gupta’, [accessed 12 November 2011]; Tanika Gupta in Billingham, At the Sharp End, p. 207. De Jongh, ‘NYT Generation’. Sam Marlowe, ‘White Boy’, The Times, 15 August 2007, [accessed 17 February 2010]. Aleks Sierz, ‘Beyond Timidity: The State of British New Writing’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 27 (2005), 55–61 (p. 57). Rachel Sheridan found the use of violin playing and singing in the stylised sequences of the play ‘contrived’, and the play ‘a showcase’ for the ‘abilities’ of the young actors. Rachel Sheridan, ‘Review of White Boy’, 2008, <http://britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/whiteboy-rev.htm [accessed 27 November 2008]. Mark Ravenhill, in Billingham, At the Sharp End, p. 126. Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools: First Report of the Advisory Group on Citizenship (QCA, 1998), p. 10. Mark Ravenhill, ‘Citizenship’, in Shell Connections 2005: New Plays for Young People ed. by Suzy Graham-Adriani (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), pp. 211–74 (p. 229). Further references will be given in the text. Mark Ravenhill, quoted in Jim Mulligan, ‘A Zig-Zag Path towards Some Idea of Who You Are’, in Shell Connections 2005, pp. 263–66 (p. 265). Sarah Jane Dickenson, ‘Fear of the Queer Citizen’, in Alternatives within the Mainstream II, ed. by Dimple Godiwala (Newcastle: Cambridge Schools Publishing, 2007), pp. 124–41 (p. 137). Civil partnerships for gay couples were introduced in 2004. Voice therapists Moya L. Andrews and Anne C. Summers claim that the voices of children are more ‘transparent’ than adult voices, which have developed protecting strategies. Moya L. Andrews and Anne C. Summers, Voice Treatment for Children and Adolescents (San Diego: Singular, 2002), p. 8. Kate Kellaway, ‘Review of Burn, Chatroom, Citizenship’, Observer, 19 March 2006; and Spencer, ‘Review of Burn, Chatroom, Citizenship’, both in Theatre Record, 26 (2006), 297–300 (p. 298). Performance of Citizenship, National Theatre, 18 March 2006. Rachel Halliburton, ‘Review of Burn, Chatroom, Citizenship’, Time Out, 22 March 2006; Sheridan Morley, ‘Review of Burn, Chatroom, Citizenship’, Daily Express, 16 March 2006; and Billington, ‘Review of Burn, Chatroom, Citizenship’, all in Theatre Record, 297–300. Anthony Banks, interview with the author, National Theatre, 16 June 2008. ‘Chatroom Citizenship’, [accessed 3 January 2009]. Sheridan, ‘Review of White Boy’. Conference delegates, ‘The Urban Voice’, in The Contemporary Voice: How We Teach Voice in the New Millennium, ed. by Bruce Wooding (London: International Centre for Voice, 2006), pp. 69–71 (p. 70). Ros Steen, ‘Introduction to the Day’, in Wooding, pp. 7–15 (p. 7). Conference delegates, ‘The Urban Voice’, in Wooding, pp. 70–71. Duncan, ‘Language and Identity’, p. 39. UNICEF, An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries (Florence: Innocenti Research Centre, 2007), p. 6, p. 37. Also see Les Black, Marjorie Mayo and Kalbir Shukra, A Voice for Young People: An Evaluation of the Lewisham Youth Participation Project (London: Centre for Urban and Community Research, 2000). Anthony Giddens, often cited as New Labour's ideological architect, claimed that a democratic society must give ‘equal ranking’ to each voice, ensure ‘participation’, and provide means ‘for individuals to make their voices heard’. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 186. In 2002 the Electoral Commission set up a campaign called ‘Votes Are Power’ in schools. An ‘independent’ Commission was set up and reported in 2005 that ‘non-voting and disengagement from the electoral politics are evident throughout society, particularly amongst younger age-groups’. The Electoral Commission, Engaging the Public in Great Britain: An Analysis of Campaigns and Media Coverage [accessed 30 January 2012]; Sean Coughlan, ‘Young People Vote Against Politics’, 28 January 2003, [accessed 21 October 2008]. Arts Council England, Roles and Functions of the English Regional Producing Theatres Fund Report (Bristol: Peter Boyden Associates, 2000), p. 38. Arts Council England, Paving the Way: Mapping of Young People's Participatory Theatre (Arts Council England, 2007), [accessed 30 January 2012], p. 3. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. by John B. Thompson, trans. by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 58. John Deeney, ‘National Causes/Moral Causes? The National Theatre, Young People and Citizenship’, Research in Drama Education, 12 (2007), 331–44. Karen Eden and Debi Roker, Doing Something: Young People as Social Actors (Leicester: National Youth Agency, 2002), p. 11. Peter Rumney, discussion, ‘It Isn't Fixed’, Writernet Conference, Arcola Theatre, 7 December 2008. Ninety-seven per cent of adult respondents to an Arts Council survey in 2002 believed that children should have access to the arts. Forty-three per cent of eighteen to twenty-four year olds believed that something of value would be lost if their local area lost its cultural activities, compared with 71% of fifty-five to sixty-four year olds. Arts Council England, Arts in England: Attendance, Participation and Attitudes in 2001 (Office of National Statistics, 2002), p. 48. Horwood, interview with the author, London, 20 October 2008. The scheme has been sponsored by Shell, BT, and by Faber & Faber, who publish the plays' scripts and supply them to secondary schools. In 2006 for the first time three plays were selected for public performance in the Cottesloe: Mark Ravenhill's Citizenship, Deborah Gearing's Burn, and Enda Walsh's Chatroom. Banks, interview with the author. Suzy Graham-Adriani, ‘Introduction’, Shell Connections 2005, pp. vii–x (p. vii). Suzy Graham-Adriani, quoted in Charlotte Cripps, ‘Preview: NT Shell Connections’, Independent, 27 June 2005, [accessed 19 February 2010]. Paul Taylor praised the ‘ensemble of terrific young acting talent’; Sheridan Morley noted, ‘There are enough star performances to provide a valuable evening for a talent scout’; and Benedict Nightingale commented, ‘young British actors are in rich supply’. Paul Taylor, ‘Review of Burn, Chatroom, Citizenship’, Independent, 17 March 2006; Morley, ‘Review of Burn, Chatroom, Citizenship’; and Nightingale, ‘Review of Burn, Chatroom, Citizenship’, all in Theatre Record, 297–300 (pp. 297–98). Anthony Banks, quoted in Lindsey Turner, ‘First-Night Nerves’, Guardian, 8 April 2008, [accessed 21 June 2010]. Enda Walsh, ‘Chatroom’, in Shell Connections 2005: New Plays for Young People (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), pp. 155–209 (p. 157). Further references will be given in the text. Recalcitrant teenagers appeared in a host of character shows. Harry Enfield's Television Programme, created by Harry Enfield (BBC Two, 1990); The Catherine Tate Show, created by Catherine Tate and Derren Litten (BBC Two, 2004); Little Britain, created by David Walliams and Matt Lucas (BBC One, 2004). Jim Mulligan, ‘Lord of the Flies in a Chatroom’, in Shell Connections 2005 (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), pp. 197–200 (p. 199). Barron, Giving Youth a Voice, p. 31. Performance of Chatroom, National Theatre, 18 March 2006. Taylor, ‘Review of Burn, Chatroom, Citizenship’; Marmion, ‘Review of Burn, Chatroom, Citizenship’; Halliburton, ‘Review of Burn, Chatroom, Citizenship’; and Billington, ‘Review of Burn, Chatroom, Citizenship’, all in Theatre Record, 26 (2006), pp. 297–300. Nadia Mendoza, ‘A Magical Salary!’, Daily Mail, 30 November 2011, [accessed 30 November 2011]. The TUC has expressed concern over work experience schemes that offer employers (rather than young people) financial incentives. ‘Work Experience Fails to Deal with Our Youth Jobs Crisis’, [accessed 2 December 2011]. Alexander Topping, ‘Farewell Youth Clubs, Hello Street Life – and Gang Warfare’, Guardian, 29 July 2011, [accessed 2 December 2011]. ‘Theatre Blog’, [accessed 30 November 2011]. The extensive statistical analyses offered by the production reflected that non-juveniles were heavily involved too. The Riots Theatre Programme, Tricycle, November 2011. Performance of The Riots, Tricycle Theatre, 30 November 2011. Audience demographics varied, both at the Tricycle and at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Tottenham to which the play transferred.