Our Generation
National Theatre, London; Chichester Festival Theatre
The playwright Alecky Blythe is British theatre’s leading recording artist. Since 2003, she has taped interviews with witnesses to various aspects of British society. These become verbatim plays – The Riots: In Their Own Words; Do We Look Like Refugees?! – in which actors repeat, complete with every stutter, the edited testimony.
A variation on the technique remains one of the most memorable plays of this century. In the National Theatre’s London Road (2012), Blythe’s interviews with Ipswich residents in the area where Steve Wright murdered five sex workers in 2006 were filleted into a libretto scored by Adam Cork. The haunting effect of mundane sentences – “Everybody is very very nervous” – sung as a kind of Lieder found completely original space between verbatim theatre and the musical.
Blythe returns to the National with Our Generation but without Cork. This show is only speech – and lots of it: 656 hours of interviews with students in six British schools from 2015 to 2020 have been edited into 212 scenes that play out over three hours and 40 minutes with two intervals.
