The Get-Out is the best piece of student writing I have seen at Oxford. Like all new plays it had that moment, about ten minutes in, when you nervously think “is this going to work?” – occurring in this case because Flanigan makes use of two unashamedly over-worn motifs: “talented small-town boy leaves for the city” and “corporate fat-cats try to shut down the charitable underdog”. But it works because it’s funny.
The play is built on two complementary asymmetries: one between the three adults running the theatre group and the teenagers in it, and the other between the “the morning after” – the first half of the play – and “the night before” – the second half of the play, after which the stage, characters and plot were left with a lovely sense of closure, because every detail – post-its, pillows and cigarette butts – was put exactly where it began. The direction (Josie Mitchell) shows impressive range: as clear and dynamic in the tense and silent scenes, as in the scenes of cacophonic revelry.
The acting was consistently strong and entertaining – if a little self-conscious at the beginning. The accent-coaching the actors are rumoured to have received evidently had paid off; and, if their intonation was at times imperfect, this was probably best for the intelligibility of the performance. Particularly notable was Ella Waldman who managed to maintain her Northern Irish trill while giving a quite lengthy and vehement speech. As a group the ‘adults’ (Waldman, Lloyd Houston and writer Mary Flanigan) gave mature performances with subtle and life-like interactions, each betraying moments of weakness through comically strong personalities, creating variable degrees of likability and an invariable humanity.
Most impressive – because so easily got wrong – was the acting out on stage of adolescent drunkenness. Flanigan gets away with reminding the audience their own most embarrassing and least genuinely witty memories because each her characters diverges sufficiently from their stereotypes to enable original and yet recognisable parody. (Kudos should here be given to the costumes, which brought back vivid gold-hooped memories of school.) I was especially impressed with Luke Rollason, whose short-but-sweet drunken protestations were executed to delightful comic perfection, despite The Get-Out being his thespian debut (excluding a short stint in a nativity in primary school).
The real success of The Get-Out is to offer an obscure situation – a Northern Irish youth theatre group – and render it intriguing and entertaining without reducing it to its universal bones. As a Londoner with a extremely superficial knowledge of Northern Ireland, I was drawn in and educated by the more culturally specific aspects of the play (the charming slang, for example); a distanced positioning which cleverly mimicked the experiential gap between the adolescents, and the adults running the theatre group.
The Get-Out was an exciting and professional production, succeeding where so much student theatre fails, because of its unusually considered scope: it was clever-funny and slap-stick funny; political and accessible; well-written, well-acted and well-directed.
Watch this space.
