(Not) Virgins
A boy stands half-silhouetted in front of a lighted screen, arms uplifted, shouting, screaming, to an unseen presence above him: God? The world? Or no-one in particular? "I'm tame," he spits, "I'm tame boy--everybody, please, shit on me!" The sight, it has to be said, is something to behold, and probably not something you expect to come across on a daily basis, even when dabbling in the waters of edgy arts centre plays. In a different context, with a different build-up, maybe the line could have been stunning, powerful, shocking, resonant. Unfortunately, it was just funny.
Perhaps the fundamental flaw in Virgins is the title, and everything else stems from that. A play about teenagers exploring their relatively newfound sex lives and parents struggling to keep theirs going, it is quite clearly not about virgins. Of the four characters, only the fifteen-year-old sister could indeed claim this title. It is quite possible, in fact, probable, that there is some kind of clever meaning hidden within--maybe they are virgins in the field of communication, or something of that ilk. However, Virgins seems to be aimed at teenagers who perhaps wouldn't usually go to the theatre, and who are unlikely to have any interest in picking apart layers of meaning in a play's title. "The content of this play seems to be the opposite of the title," they might think, "I am puzzled by this." Assuming they think in the style of Critical Thinking example texts, at least.
The plot, in essence, revolves around a few weeks in the lives of a four-person family, each with their own sexual difficulties. Seventeen-year-old Jack wakes up in the front garden after a party, discovers he has taken cocaine, slept with two different girls, and now has an STI. His younger sister Zoë wants her first time to be special, and is worried about her brother's attitude to the incident. Meanwhile, their overworked mother and unsatisfied father are having difficulties relighting the sparks between them. The premise looks worryingly similar to the kind of up-to-the-minute, really-communicating-with-young-people-innit-man productions that those over the age of ten are forced to endure now and again in a school hall in the name of sex education, and this is pretty much how it comes across on stage. It is, to put it bluntly, unrealistic. Many of the conversations in Virgins seem terribly unlikely to ever take place in real life, though if you know a fifteen-year-old girl who has asked her father to tell her about his first sexual experience, I stand corrected.
There are some saving graces. The acting, for the most part, is good: perhaps not blow-you-away standards, but good. The only problems are the incidences where a character suddenly shouts far too loudly without any apparent build in tension, which seem forced and unrealistic (see opening paragraph). The minimal set, with lighted screens, boxes to sit and stand on, and a small model house, is effective without being distracting.
But then there is the dancing. Dear Lord, the dancing. There is not much to be said, except possibly "what?" and "why?" and "oh God". Again, the fusion of gritty realism, or at least what is believed to be gritty realism, and expressive dance to Bach and the Arctic Monkeys is probably a very good idea in the eyes of, well, almost all the reviews of Virgins, for a start, but… it seems rather odd and pretentious. As the actors thrash about on stage, jumping around employing motifs, canon, unison, spine movement, and generally Expressing Themselves, the target audience--well, those who aren't busy being reminded of that afternoon where the family planning representative came in for an hour and extolled the virtues of the condom whilst everybody stared at the floor--begins to remember the last time they had to jump around in a similar manner in footless tights in the gym. School dance teachers across the country will enjoy Virgins, if nobody else.
So, overall? The plot is contrived--the resolution, too, is unsatisfying and largely unexplained--the scenes and dialogue often unrealistic, the whole thing reminiscent of Key Stage 3 sex education, and the dancing just bizarre. It's possibly worth it for the line "You’re King Slag, Jack," although this is debatable. The average teenager is unlikely to learn anything they haven’t already been told by a friend or read on the internet. One day the adult generation will learn that attempting to "get down with the kids", in play format as much as any other, is futile, although I fear it will not be for some time.
*
(No offence to Stefan, who was really cool, and excellent at arguing with Twixes. We still heart you.)
Perhaps the fundamental flaw in Virgins is the title, and everything else stems from that. A play about teenagers exploring their relatively newfound sex lives and parents struggling to keep theirs going, it is quite clearly not about virgins. Of the four characters, only the fifteen-year-old sister could indeed claim this title. It is quite possible, in fact, probable, that there is some kind of clever meaning hidden within--maybe they are virgins in the field of communication, or something of that ilk. However, Virgins seems to be aimed at teenagers who perhaps wouldn't usually go to the theatre, and who are unlikely to have any interest in picking apart layers of meaning in a play's title. "The content of this play seems to be the opposite of the title," they might think, "I am puzzled by this." Assuming they think in the style of Critical Thinking example texts, at least.
The plot, in essence, revolves around a few weeks in the lives of a four-person family, each with their own sexual difficulties. Seventeen-year-old Jack wakes up in the front garden after a party, discovers he has taken cocaine, slept with two different girls, and now has an STI. His younger sister Zoë wants her first time to be special, and is worried about her brother's attitude to the incident. Meanwhile, their overworked mother and unsatisfied father are having difficulties relighting the sparks between them. The premise looks worryingly similar to the kind of up-to-the-minute, really-communicating-with-young-people-innit-man productions that those over the age of ten are forced to endure now and again in a school hall in the name of sex education, and this is pretty much how it comes across on stage. It is, to put it bluntly, unrealistic. Many of the conversations in Virgins seem terribly unlikely to ever take place in real life, though if you know a fifteen-year-old girl who has asked her father to tell her about his first sexual experience, I stand corrected.
There are some saving graces. The acting, for the most part, is good: perhaps not blow-you-away standards, but good. The only problems are the incidences where a character suddenly shouts far too loudly without any apparent build in tension, which seem forced and unrealistic (see opening paragraph). The minimal set, with lighted screens, boxes to sit and stand on, and a small model house, is effective without being distracting.
But then there is the dancing. Dear Lord, the dancing. There is not much to be said, except possibly "what?" and "why?" and "oh God". Again, the fusion of gritty realism, or at least what is believed to be gritty realism, and expressive dance to Bach and the Arctic Monkeys is probably a very good idea in the eyes of, well, almost all the reviews of Virgins, for a start, but… it seems rather odd and pretentious. As the actors thrash about on stage, jumping around employing motifs, canon, unison, spine movement, and generally Expressing Themselves, the target audience--well, those who aren't busy being reminded of that afternoon where the family planning representative came in for an hour and extolled the virtues of the condom whilst everybody stared at the floor--begins to remember the last time they had to jump around in a similar manner in footless tights in the gym. School dance teachers across the country will enjoy Virgins, if nobody else.
So, overall? The plot is contrived--the resolution, too, is unsatisfying and largely unexplained--the scenes and dialogue often unrealistic, the whole thing reminiscent of Key Stage 3 sex education, and the dancing just bizarre. It's possibly worth it for the line "You’re King Slag, Jack," although this is debatable. The average teenager is unlikely to learn anything they haven’t already been told by a friend or read on the internet. One day the adult generation will learn that attempting to "get down with the kids", in play format as much as any other, is futile, although I fear it will not be for some time.
*
(No offence to Stefan, who was really cool, and excellent at arguing with Twixes. We still heart you.)
posted by irony in motion at 4:30 pm
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