Simon McBurney Reviews The Boy from Centreville
This is quite simply the most remarkable student theatre production I have ever witnessed. Because it challenges all the terms I have just used.
It is created by students, but would be at home on the professional stage.
It is not simply a piece of theatre but asks questions about what theatre actually is.
And it is not just a production but an event.
Even these remarks have to be questioned. To call it professional is to perhaps only tell something about the standard of acting, design (Sound, Video, Scenic and Lighting), scripting and execution. What it does is take a subject that is an essential mirror of our times, and ask questions about responsibility, ethics and identity that are the most urgent ideas that surround us today. And it does so in the most remarkably original, daring and utterly gripping fashion.
We recognise the theatrical story-telling, but the telling is constantly disturbing, questioning and insistently worrying. This is, of course, in part because of the nature of the violence being explored, but it is also because of the FORM which it takes. Brilliantly mixing form with content, we are held as if in an horrific thriller, challenged as in the most graphic documentary, and made to doubt our initial reactions to this horrendous event that unfolds in front of us by the sheer audacious beauty of the stage craft.
And when the silence descended on the audience at the end of the 'performance', it was clear that we were asked questions about our own lives, not merely witnessing someone else's. In this sense it is an event. But it is not just an event about now. You are seeing a glimpse of what theatre can also be. Perhaps what theatre WILL become.
I urge anyone interested in where we are going to see this piece, and support this important production.
Simon McBurney.
March 2008
