Punk Rock

For its declarative title, anarchic choreography and bracing themes, there is something remarkably staid about Punk Rock. First performed in Manchester in 2009, Simon Stephens’ play naturalistically captures the angst of seven teenagers, sticking it out through their A-levels year and corresponding adolescent malaise. They meet in the old library of their posh school, exchange vulgarities and flirtations, and reveal their personal backgrounds unceremoniously with a bleakness that feels overworn well before the midway mark. The play seems desperate to get through a laundry list of over-familiar teen issues as viewed by an older generation. Broken families, self-harm, eating disorders, homophobia and racism are all alluded to, often in a fleeting and cursory way, as additions to an overdrawn and tedious malaise. The dialogue, like Stephens’ superior Tusk Tusk, is reliably clever, but the traits of the characters rarely congeal into coherence. Balancing each member of the ensemble is no easy task, and the chaos that ensues doesn’t create the fluidity it’s going for, instead creating an impression of incongruence and confusion. The sudden and Heathers-esque shift to violence in the final scenes of the play provide an incredibly well-executed ending which provokes thought but ultimately fails to alleviate the frustrating sense of pointlessness that pervades the story. 

Punk Rock’s tiresome nature is a disappointment after the compelling Tusk Tusk, produced by the same company earlier this year. Like that show, the performances are top-notch: Karl Richmond’s seemingly inexhaustible energy gives a hyperactivity to his school bully character, and when he takes the step from irritating and inappropriate to cruel and vulgar, it’s genuinely piercing. Laurence Boxhall is fantastic in a monologue about his nerdy character’s tragic view of the world. There’s a bunch of other media creations stretching back from Catcher In The Rye to Skins that Punk Rock seems to echo, but it only ever feels like a pale facsimile of the best fruits of the ‘teen angst’ tree. Unfortunately, Punk Rock is one to miss.