Playwright Ray Scannell and director Emelie Fitzgibbon have come together once more, this time on a piece that articulates and amplifies the experience of young adults in a world of impromptu actions and decisions. It takes the haphazard lives of the young, anxious for highs, in revolt against the cosseting of parents and the tedium of school. They engage in subterfuge to evade the adult eyes, yearning to be older than they are. Twin girls and two brothers play hooky to get to a rock festival. The boys want to lose themselves in a blur of intoxication, and the girls want to offer up their virginities: “We’re practically women.”
In a relentless verbal fusillade, Scannell fires hundreds of well-honed one-liners with an insistent beat which seeks to engage the audience in a virtual experience of the festival. The language is racy and fearless in its use of expletives: there’s no concession to politeness or adult sensitivities. The consumption of substances and alcohol is fervid; the sex is a graphic “up and fumble,” rite of passage.
It’s a roller-coaster ride through the ‘permutations’ of teenage life – road carnage, downloads and mobiles, pills, beer and vodka, rolies, smack and powder. The framework is the field (“a sprawling metropolis of grass and stuff. Stage on the horizon.”) and the tension that rises to climactic levels with the appearance of "The Palpitations", the idolized star turn. “I will see Johnny Palpitations. On that stage. And I will scream at him. That I want his babies.” The insistent drive of dialogue and movement serves well to convey the excitement of the scene – “the Pulse Tent for Ravers, the Comedy Tent, the Pamper Palace, Queues for the Portaloos.” The ‘here and now’ predominates and these child/adults have no thought for the morrow, no real sense of a future, of any kind of permanence or of sustainable relationships.
Emelie Fitzgibbon’s production is assertive and courageous. These lives are allowed to speak for themselves. The manic world of the festival – that field full of people, mud and tents, vomit and euphoria – is a metaphor for a world spinning out of control, a world caught in the sensual beat of The Palpitations. The cast of four give their all in both physical and vocal terms. Rachel (Fiona Lucia McGarry) has all the open enthusiasm of the young and yet she also conveys a mind and body close to an alarming collapse in a feverish trance-in-a-dance. Shane Casey’s Adam is full of bravado that wilts on the proximity of the seduction. The story of the other pair, Flinty (Shane Falvey) and Rachel’s twin Gina (Una Kirwin) amplifies the theme of thoughtless youth caught in ‘that sensual music’.
The young people assert their right to make their own defiant choices, “and we’re doing as our generation dictates” and (particularly when they fall into the clutches of a pair of predatory roadies) they’re not always what they dreamed of. The literal and metaphorical hangover is a powerful presence.
Permutations and Palpitations proffers no overt moral judgment; it unravels layers of experience in dramatic form, and opens questions, without posing any trite answers. This is provocative Educational Theatre and a play that has sturdy legs of its own.
Derek West has reviewed theatre for almost 25 years. He also edits publications for NAPD, the school principals’ national organisation.