Burnished bigotries

Punk Rock
Lyric Hammersmith

Judgment Day
Almeida

In rolls another bandwagon. And who’s that on board? It’s Simon Stephens, the playwright and panic profiteer, who likes to cadge a ride from any passing controversy. His latest play is about a teenage psycho who enacts a gory shoot-out at his local school. What a strange choice. Stephens frets vociferously in the programme notes about Britain’s ‘distrust’ and ‘marginalisation’ of its youngsters. With an episcopal air, and a peculiar turn of phrase, he asserts his ‘continuing faith’ in the young. ‘They get stuff. Sometimes they may lack the vocabulary always to articulate that which they understand but I have faith that they often understand it.’ (He used to be a teacher. A pity the children didn’t drum any grammar into him.)

As soon as the play begins, so do Stephens’s woes. He can’t write a story. Instead of assigning a dilemma or a mission to a specific character he sets in motion a great tidal wave of chitchat. It’s like watching a lexical life raft self-inflate. His teenage characters — most of them vicious little gits — ring perfectly false. They have an extraordinarily well-formed sense of their place in the world and they’re full of cocksure banalities expressed in cutely tailored language. ‘I wanted to kiss Thom Yorke once. And David Bowie.’ ‘I could never really trust someone who didn’t hate his home town.’ ‘Everyone gets far too het up about inter-generational sex these days.’ One child, in Alan Titchmarsh mode, muses that ‘in this country’ he can always identify on which particular day summer turns to autumn. Even the bullied class nerd is fantastically self-assured and delivers an end-of-days prophecy with all the polished eloquence of the Unabomber. Elsewhere the script brims with the casual snobbery of the bored upper-class fascist.