Stage Struck

Theatre is the new fount of youth, says PETER CRAWLEY

IF MOST OF your scientific knowledge comes from TV commercials, you will appreciate that the finest minds in the world, not to mention the whitest coats, have been put to the service of one ideal: defeating the aging process.

The most treasured desire of humanity, more so than finding a rewarding job or someone who loves you for your record collection, is to possess eternal youth. Unless, of course, you happen to be young, in which case you’re supposed to want to grow up fast, stay up late, fall for people with bad record collections, and pay taxes until the cold, merciful release of the grave.

For those looking for a halfway point between the playground and the old folks’ home, the theatre is becoming a haven for those who refuse to act their age. Just look at Pan Pan’s current production of A Doll House, Ibsen’s drama about a woman infantilised and objectified by her father (“he called me his doll-child”), then her husband, who finally realises her own agency late in the day.

This contemporary version not only revels in presenting childish things – remote controlled toys, sexy-cute retro outfits and, in the husband Torvald, a bank manager with easy access to a Batman costume – it also implicates theatre as a grown-up industry with childlike pursuits. Each character is matched with a life-size cardboard cut-out, a metatheatrical trick that invites another title: A Model Box.

But while Nora will eventually stop acting her shoe size, that’s not the example set for us by the current stage. Referencing both Lewis Carroll and a bustling fairground in its title, the Abbey’s Alice in Funderland is, in some ways, an allegory about a nation that needs to grow up.

Yet, as a deliriously executed musical, Funderland’s appeal is to move you in the opposite direction; to do what Alice famously achieves and what the Oil of Olay boffins haven’t cracked – to grow down. Even its nods to a hard-edged club-culture of lost weekends or the incandescent excess of drag cabaret can seem nostalgic, as though a show advertised as being suitable “for ages 16 up” asks its audience to then check its maturity at the door.

Much has been made about the youth of the creators of Alice in Funderland, or “the next generation”, as they were recently heralded. Actually, they’re the “current” generation, sandwiched between a “previous” generation still maintaining control, and the actual “next” generation, inheriting debt, starved of opportunity and expecting to emigrate. We’re living longer, settling down later, and – if I understand the national recovery plan correctly – retiring never. Two hours in the theatre may be the only childhood we have left.

Still, I was surprised by the unabashed Nickelodeon whimsy of a recent bona-fide next generation production, Collapsing Horse Theatre’s Monster/Clock.

Like the Sesame Street- inspired musical Avenue Q, a commercial juggernaut brought to you by the letter $, Monster/ Clock used puppets to assist its fairytale narrative for kidults. Unfailingly charming and remarkably earnest, it never once used deadpan irony or off-bright humour as a treacle cutter.

Was this what Kurt Cobain died for, I wondered? To which they might reasonably respond, Who’s Kurt Cobain? And that gave me a sensation I haven’t often experienced in the theatre: I felt old.