Young voices are an antidote to cynicism and fear

May already – the month we all love so well. May, the month synonymous in my mind with pale-pink rosary beads strung through small fingers and processions of little girls in large grey tunics, circling the netted perimeter of the tennis courts of my primary school, shepherded by Dalek-like nuns in sooty robes and starched wimples, singing our hymns and praying hard to everyone’s favourite virgin.

May, already. How did that happen? May, and there’s still a set of Christmas fairy lights casually slung over a lamp fitting on my kitchen wall (which probably says more about my shabby housekeeping skills than it does about the abrupt passage of time).

May, and aren’t we the lucky ones not to have been spliced apart by that 400-metre-wide asteroid shooting past our suppurating planet, missing us by a galactic hair’s breadth? (Although annihilation by a stray meteor seems an almost poetic fate compared with the wilful extinction on offer from the strangely coiffed world leaders dotted around the globe like mouthy corner boys. But, who knows, maybe with a good blow-dry those excitable chaps will feel a little less bellicose and we’ll all get to hang around under the apple blossom a while longer.)

There is no correct and there is no incorrect. There is just this space to think and write and make and talk.

I abandoned my preoccupation with thermonuclear war recently and cheered myself up no end by skipping through the springtime sunshine to attend an afternoon event in the Abbey Theatre. There, for one performance only, eight young playwrights of my acquaintance were showcasing their work to an audience of friends, family and supporters.

Nervy teenage writers

This particular shindig has become an annual event, a collaboration between Fighting Words, where I volunteer, and the National Theatre. Fighting Words, for those of you who haven’t come across it, is an organisation providing free tutoring and mentoring in creative writing and related arts to children and young adults, and the National Theatre is, well, the national theatre, a place where all voices should be heard.

Anyway, for a number of years now, the Abbey has been inviting the eight new young playwrights mentored annually at Fighting Words, all aged about 16 or 17, into the theatre for a staged reading, with the help of professional directors and actors, at the culmination of our eight-month writing process.

At the beginning of that process, when nervy teenage writers turn up bright and early on a September Sunday in Drumcondra, home of Fighting Words, wishing they’d stayed in bed, we mentors (there are four of us, usually in various stages of wakefulness) introduce ourselves and tell them, simply, that they have the power to write and that, by Easter, their work will be performed on the Abbey stage. And that, on the way from this first morning, hovering around their blue plastic chairs, to the Abbey’s cushioned auditorium, there is nothing that they can possibly do, or think, or write, or say, or dream, or imagine, that is wrong.

Their voices are a kind of antidote to cynicism and fear

Think and write

There are no formulas, we tell them, no pass notes, no papers to sit or logbooks to consult; there is no certainty or need for certainty; there is no correct and there is no incorrect. There is just this space to think and write and make and talk.

With a couple of actors, a few chairs and a handful of stage lights at the disposal of their imaginations, the possibilities, we assure them, are boundless. And every spring, when I witness the young writers’ work stand up from the page and punch its way on to the Abbey stage, I feel (if it doesn’t sound too dramatic to say it) renewed and grateful to have been part of it all.

I’m not sure why, but this year more that ever I felt deeply appreciative of being allowed a glimpse of the young writers’ imaginations. I suppose it’s because their voices are a kind of antidote to cynicism and fear.

In one of the short plays an autistic teenager, struggling to communicate the complexity of his emotions, engineers a mechanical box that filled the stage with music and light. In another, a piece fuelled with laughter and wit, an 18- year-old on a flight out of Ireland to have an abortion, finds solace, understanding and true empathy in a tender robotic air steward.

You’d kind of need to have been there, but there were moments that cut through so much of the dross we dump on teenage doors, moments that challenged the notion that theirs is a generation tethered to mobile phones, caught in some sybaritic cyberspace fuelled aspic of spice bags and selfies. Moments of hope.