Teenage poses exposed in A Boy Called Nedd | Theatre review

***

The kids are not all right. That’s the impression given by Emily Gillmor Murphy’s debut play, staged by young company Bitter Like a Lemon, set among five Dublin school students exploring grief, sexuality and anger in a technologically assisted rush.

It’s easy for adults to conceive of contemporary adolescence in more hand-wringing terms. Has age-old turbulence increased unbearably for a hyper-sexualised, over-medicated and ultra-mediatised generation?

For the most part, Gillmor Murphy’s treatment is clear-eyed and compassionate. Nedd, a 16-year-old who divides his time between double maths, his pinging smartphone and furtive weekends at the Wezz, is still in shock from his brother’s suicide. Nedd, performed with endearing resilience by Conall Keating, doesn’t wallow in grief but has limited means to express his pain, anger and confusion. “What’s the point in missing someone who chose to leave?” he says, early, to his friend Anto (Liam Heslin). Later, when asked by Amilia Stewart’s Alice if he misses his brother, he replies, “a bit” .

The economy of young male expression is heart-rending, and Gillmor Murphy is good at capturing the emotional toll of a teenage pose. Jasmine Brady’s Niamh feigns brusque confidence as she demands cigarettes from an unwilling vendor. Aislinn O’Byrne’s Sophie affects coquettishness as she tries to keep pace with her sexually advanced peers. Everyone is in a hurry to grow up.

Rather than critique or counter these poses, director Karl Shiels tends to accentuate them. Laura Honan’s set is a stylish installation of lightboxes, each bearing a keen photographic detail. Between scenes, Shiels moves his cast in stylised patterns, then confines them to fetishised poses, limbs invariably akimbo, like 1980s catwalk models. It’s a little at odds with the play, which elucidates young Dublin in more varied detail: the hideous reflex of sexual rumour and internet “slut-shaming”, the afterlife of a Facebook profile that only the company can take down. These are the degradations, quietly devastating, to a person’s self-worth, irrespective of age, that culminate in a young girl asking an older man if he finds her pretty or wants to f*** her – unable to tell the difference.

That Gillmor Murphy hints towards a still more calamitous crescendo suggests something more unsettling for these teens: that we can't spot the real tragedy when it's in front of us. Until June 13th