Heart of the matter

Gone Too Far!
Hackney Empire

Eating Ice Cream on Gaza Beach
Soho

Piaf
Donmar

Gone Too Far! is a rarity, a play that can persuade young audiences that the theatre offers pleasures unavailable elsewhere. After the show there was a knife crime debate where an impressive youth worker named John Bravo told the teenage boys in the audience, ‘Black kids blame the police when they get stopped and searched. Don’t blame the police. It’s your fault. Look at the statistics. See how many black kids carry knives.’ He was black himself, and 19 years old, so he knew what he was talking about. He urged his peers to question the platitude that ‘the community’ must show young people how to live. No, he said, young people must show the community that they know how to live. These uncomfortable truths were universally applauded.

The National Youth Theatre also wants to attract young audiences but it needs meatier fare than Shelley Silas’s whimsical new play set in Gaza where everyone gathers on the beach to gossip, eat ice-lollies and complain about the Israelis. The story follows Adrian, a ginger-haired English Jew, who is spending his gap year chatting to Palestinians. The dialogue is threadbare and repetitive. ‘I just want to understand,’ says Adrian three times. ‘Have you come to make peace?’ he’s asked four times. The characters are devoid of vitality or novelty. The males work off their aggression by playing football while the females are required to do little more than grimace as if they’ve been waiting for a bus for 3,000 years. There’s a chorus of veiled snifflers who burst into tears in harmony and add sound effects to complement the action. When a drowned child is mentioned by her bereaved mum, the womenfolk cradle their arms and make sploshing noises and then fling out their hands in a gesture of loss. The play climaxes with a peaceful protest being broken up by trigger-happy Israeli hotheads. Naturally, someone innocent gets shot and the only surprise is that it’s not Adrian. The play ends with no one, audience included, understanding anything.

Piaf is a wonderful production of Pam Gems’s flawed but highly entertaining play. The trouble is that the script almost kills itself with overwork. Starting with Piaf’s chance discovery in the street, it follows her through the depression, the war, the occupation, the peace, her triumph in France and America, friendships with Dietrich and Aznavour, strings of toyboys, several car crashes and her last-gasp marriage to a Greek hairdresser 20 years her junior. Elena Roger brilliantly evokes Piaf’s coarseness, energy and humour but she can’t reproduce that voice. The one thing that draws us to Piaf was missing. Not that this bothered the audience much. I’ve rarely seen a crowd leap so readily from their seats to applaud. A few tickets are still available.