The National Theatre’s New Connections season fizzes with promise. A play by David Mamet called The Vikings and Darwin sounds as though it could be a journey into the deep hinterland of ethnography, while the title of William Boyd’s Six Parties stirs memories of his Eighties screenplays about the awkwardness of adolescence and also — for me at least — of Michael Winterbottom’s scrappy ode to tumescence, Nine Songs.
In fact, Mamet’s effort is a tiny squib. It is supposed to present "a philosophical argument about whether aggression is an acceptable solution to seemingly unfathomable puzzles". This sounds Gordian and intriguing but it’s almost blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatre — elliptical and then over.
The play fleetingly invites us to think about whether our behaviour is genetically determined. Despite the careful specificity of this production, located in Churchill’s Whitehall Map Room in 1941, Mamet’s ideas prove opaque. The actors, from the King’s School in Chester, don’t have much to do and seem uncomfortably aware of this. It is hard not to feel that they have been shortchanged by Mamet.
Six Parties is better. Set in a nameless African country, among a mixed group of affluent teenagers, it speaks with unfussy effectiveness about the emotional and social trials of edging into adulthood.
Over the course of several months, bouncing between one shindig and the next, Boyd’s characters move from simple hedonism to a nastily political form of self-indulgence. Their relationships snag on the klutzy figure of fixer Femi, a drug dealer who — when he is drafted into the army — becomes an albatross.
Boyd’s writing could be more bracing but it has pace and focus. These qualities are accentuated by the lucid direction of Emma Keele and by Karen Lowe’s zippy choreography. The performers, from London’s South Thames College, display energy and sensitivity, and clearly relish the feelgood potential of the occasion.
New Connections: The Vikings and Darwin/Six Parties
National's Cottesloe
