Cloud Busting/Shooting Truth
★★✩✩✩/★★★★✩
Bassett/ Too Fast
★★★★✩/★★★✩✩
If, as the advertising has it, we're better, connected, then the National is certainly better with Connections. This annual jamboree involving young people's theatre groups from "the Shetlands to Plymouth, Norwich to Belfast" has been developing splendidly for over a decade. This year it has seen 200 companies perform 10 specially commissioned plays from some of the best young writers around, and compete for 10 prestigious London showcase opportunities.
The first four productions shared many admirable qualities, not least energy in abundance from committed ensembles. However if this cowardly critic, who would never have dared venture anywhere near one of the country's premier stages at the age of 13, might offer one piece of advice, it would be: "Speak up!" Audibility problems can scupper months of terrific preparation.
Opening the five-night festival in some style was Bassett, by the always intriguing James Graham, performed by CAST ensemble from the East Midlands.
A class of citizenship students at Wootton Bassett School has been locked in by an unravelling supply teacher, which means they'll miss the latest repatriation ceremony for fallen soldiers for which this valiant Wiltshire town has become famous. The fact that one of the dead men was a former schoolmate ups the stakes and as time ticks debates spark and tempers fray, in a profitable
slow-burn hour. The real citizenship lessons to be learned here, we swiftly understand, are extracurricular.
A tough act to follow, but Scarborough Youth Theatre managed well with Douglas Maxwell's perky exposé of our obsession with reality TV, Too Fast.
Some odd lurches of focus in the script wrongfooted the performers, but they fared better than Customs House Youth Theatre, from South Shields, with Helen Blakeman's abrupt and at times bewildering adaptation of Malorie Blackman's anti-bullying novel Cloud Busting.
A sophisticated end to the second night came from Shooting Truth by Molly Davies, a Blair Witch-style tale that confidently interleaves the present with the 1640s, as a group of students make a film about a supposed teenage witch, Freya.
TYKES, from Teignmouth, had great fun with the staging possibilities of these overlapping narratives, as both real and actress Freyas struggle against hostile peers. Connections proves conclusively that the kids really are alright.
Connections continues until July 4; 020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk
Cloud Busting / Shooting Truth / Bassett / Too Fast
National's Cottesloe
SE1
