Porcelain
Dolls
Director
- Steve Small
Playwright + Assistant Director - Tim Primrose
Company - Lyceum Youth Theatre info
Venues and
Dates -Performed in February 2001 also see other Tim Primrose
play This Here Now performed
by Lyceum Youth Theatre at end of June 2001
Reviewer
Thelma Good
The fairer sex? Are we? Tim Primrose's play developed with some of his fellow members of Lyceum Youth Theatre wittily takes us back and forth between the day after the school dance and the evening of it. With 13 girls and 3 boys the cast give us 16 different young people trying to survive in the jungle we oldies try to call the "Best years of your life." Set in a girls' toilet where teachers never come, from the moment the play begins it flushes away any audience resistance. With its well drawn pithy characters we see childhood games that carry on into the struggle to become young women and may last all their lives. The fairer sex can be very skilled at using physiological weapons.
Porcelain
Dolls is a super play, very well structured with humour and making
great points with tremendous insight. Concentrating on the girls' interactions
we see the female of the species in all their forms, the bully and her
slaves, the loner, the totally confused and the girl who is always on
her golden phone saying she's in/on the toilet. Not only do you get
to understand the young children they were, the young girls they are,
but also the older women they might become as they gang up, fall out,
empower or do one another down.
And so theatrically and entertainingly done, they have thought of everything
to make this a smashing production. The technical side too is professionally
executed with the many sound effects always there on the nail. Steve
Small, the director of the play and Head of Education, Royal Lyceum,
has superbly made his point that young actors should be allowed to act
their age. This new play and production show that plays about this age
group and acted by them, work very well whoever watches. 'Cause we're
all still growing up even though we oldies don't admit it.
To
pick out one performance would be wrong. They are all very, good indeed,
definitely actors who have grasped what the craft is about. Ailidh
Mackay, Zoe Hunter, Beth Godfrey, Sarah MacGillivary, Kim Gergard, Caroline
Hay, Amy Morgan, Carolyn Barret, Sam Chapman, Sara Vickers, Emma Neilson,
Shona Mackay, Kirsty Robertson, Tim Primrose, Chris Lynch and Neil
Mackay I mention you all - thanks for an excellent time in the toilets,
If you can go and see this, Go. Lyceum Youth Theatre I look forward
eagerly to your next production and Tim Primrose - please keep writing.
I haven't awarded one of these since the Festival - it's a Good's Great.
© Thelma Good 22 February 2001
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