20.17 Blog #27: Our Mutual Friend and Our Mutual World-Building

My favourite author, Franz Kafka, had a great affinity for the work of Charles Dickins.  You can see in his work the attempt to employ Dickins’ style:  Larger-than-life characters, exploring the workings of a city through a protagonist and ‘world-building’.  Especially in books like The Castle and America.

I made the comparison because in 2016 I adapted Kafka's The Castle for Hull Truck Youth Theatre, and this week had the great privilege of seeing their version of Dickins’ Our Mutual Friend by Bryony Lavery.  I used the term ‘world-building’, a phrase which probably needs unpacking by more literary scholarly people elsewhere, but in the context of theatre, Kafka and Dickins are excellent tools to ‘build worlds’.  In Youth Theatre, it’s practically essential you build the world around the characters.

In a Youth Theatre show, you often have a vast array of young people.  The Dumb Waiter or Abigail’s Party or Art certainly exist within a world, but it’s a small world of a handful of actors in a single room.  But Youth Theatre can boast much larger casts, and can use this to their advantage to build societies, scenes, locations and, essentially, a whole world.  The river dwellings, the dust mounds, the High Society toffs, the pubs and the water itself all become locations full of movement and character.  There’s never a dull moment, and the world constantly whirls from place to place with effective pace.  There’s a core cast of characters who present the inhabitants of this world with vigour, all scrabbling and searching for better lives in this grey Victorian land.  Meanwhile the chorus of Mutual Friends shape the world around them: building, exploring and expanding.  It is testament to director Tom Bellerby’s experience with this group, able to mould them into a flawless tight, whirling ensemble.

The end result is an effective telling of what could be a complex story.  It never gets too bogged down in each individual moment, but finds the overarching themes.  Plots, subplots and sub-sub-plots are all marvellously packaged by a tight ensemble.  I could smell the filthy river, the pampered Houses, the stale taxidermy shop.  This is a great success on the part of the creative team as well, the eerie and ever-moving crooked wooden set providing a suitable platform for the cast, not to mention the chilling, ever-present musical score.  Lavery's script is fast-paced, but takes time to tell a few good character-driven joeks before rattling off into another part of London.

In The Castle, I tried to conjure a cold, desolate village of inhospitable pubs, quiet secretive streets and the brooding presence of the Castle itself.  The ensemble of Hull Truck built this world marvellously, but allowed room for perversely flamboyant characters.  It is here that Youth Theatre can really achieve what a ‘professional’ cast of adults cannot. 

I also saw another Youth Theatre show last month.  In The Blue Road by Laura Lomas, recent commission for Derby Theatre, Dundee Rep and the Royal & Derngate, the cast portray a post-apocalyptic world.  Tensions are high, danger lurks and food is scarce.  But what helps define the dystopian world is the backing chorus, their poetic musing on the past, on the present, on hoe, opens up this world beyond the handful of teenagers discussing their options to a larger tale about human struggle.

As someone who visits, and runs, a number of nights where performances are tied to a single mic and a single performer, it is a pleasure to see shows which take me beyond into a huge, sprawling world and navigate the characters within.