Her current squeeze.
Prior to curtain a woman three rows in front exploded a bag of jellybellys in a bright tangle. I call them “bellys”, they might actually have been the generic beans or babies, but the americanism fits. This very youthful, ebullient, measuredly soppy, soft edged and hard-worked play, uses a critical mass of mainstream pop Americana references to tell its story about love and the workings of the human heart. Throwing in Four Weddings and a Madness for good measure, and this piece from the much-fêted Junction 25 Youth theatre in Glasgow is refreshing for it’s lack if cynicism about such matters, cliches are breathed anew just as they are ironised, and despite some of the material on offer (Titanic) being unworkably thin, the slightly unwieldy piece heaves itself into our hearts with a mixture of doe-eyed entreaties and wide-eyed enterprise.
When 14 year old Adam stands on the vast black panelled stage, like a young cherubic Michael Cera, holding a human heart and declares “I haven’t got any experience of romantic love” he breaks a few motherly valve systems. He is left out of the massified experiment in relationships that unfolds across the space, fruit-based synaesthesia ends in a line of pulped tomatoes, like ventricular remains of the type a stock nerd character insists on reeling off factoids about. Violins are mercilessly scraped, the aural component of a clever relationship between limitation and irony that runs through the piece; a piece that laughs at it’s shortcomings while parading them, and that uses the goodwill that audiences have toward the young to canny effect.
There is much stamping and gallivanting, before Tom – looking like Frankie Muniz, while being treated by his peers like Fatty Arbuckle’s evil brother – is criticised and abused indiscriminately, constantly, from all quarters, as before our eyes he ages into a sort of Will Ferrell schlub. But while the random cruelty of the adolescent is quite present for a piece so heartwarming, the main sense is of a sort of British theatrical equivalent of a distilled and clarified Glee; a thousand times more wholesome, a tight rein on glitz and show, but still that clubby sense of youthful togetherness that can come off to anyone cast into the wilderness of adult life post-18 as just smug, yet here, infused with theatrical purpose and a keen knowingness, makes for genuinely enjoyable ensemble theatre. The final number, as poor neglected Tom throws off his shackles, and is joined by the rest of the cast in an overwrought, transcendently idiotic rendition of Justin Timberlake’s Cry me a River, was enough to turn a calcified heart to jelly.
