I’m always full of admiration for what the R&D’s Young Companies can achieve on stage; their productions are always full of style, conviction, and a sense of occasion; they’re something you can positively look forward to. This year the Young Company: Create have worked on Laura Lomas’ The Blue Road under the direction of Ashley Elbourne, and you quickly realise and appreciate the commitment of the cast both to the work and to ensuring that the audience have the best time possible.

Are you sensing a “but” coming? I might as well come straight out with it – sadly, I just didn’t like the play. It had some very interesting ideas in it, which the cast drew out as well as one could hope; but the actual words the cast had to say almost drove me to desperation! A typical sentence (this isn’t in the play, I’ve made it up) might be “I remember. I remember a cloud. I remember a white fluffy cloud. I remember a white fluffy cloud on the top of that hill…” etc. So many sentences seemed to me to be structured like that. A; A+B; A+B+C; A+B+C+D; and so on. I don’t think people talk like that. Not even in a reverie, which is so much of what the ensemble had to provide as a counterpoint to the main story of the play – an unexplained dystopian/ post-apocalyptic situation where children vie for superiority and control over others.

There’s a lot of Lord of the Flies in there; maybe some Girl With All The Gifts too – it wouldn’t have surprised me to discover a host of zombies just off-stage. We never find out what it is that’s created this terrible world; but that’s not, in itself, a problem. The children capture a girl who speaks in an Eastern European/Russian language, cage her, and threaten to kill her. Craig, the self-appointed leader of these vulnerable, scared and occasionally intimidating kids, tells her to have the decency to speak English or he’ll shoot. It’s like an apocalyptic parable of a post-Brexit landscape, where locals are terrified of outsiders and turn to violence to suppress them. In another scene, the delightful Craig takes the baby bird that Thomas has been nurturing back to health and kills it by chucking a stone down on it. It’s a high impact, high shock moment that the cast performed superbly well; and it very much reminded me of the shocking central scene of Edward Bond’s Saved that was notoriously banned by the censor in 1965.

The final scene takes us to a flashback where Craig and Pia first meet; a beautifully played portrayal of simple innocence and maybe a charming hope for the future. Then Thomas shoots them. The audience leaves the theatre asking how on earth can that be? If they die in a flashback, how can the rest of the play take place? I have some theories. 1) It’s a complete mistake and the writer didn’t know what the hell she was doing. Verdict: unlikely. 2) For the rest of the play up until that moment, Craig and Pia are ghosts. I’d have to watch it again to see if this could be true, and whether their interaction with the other characters makes it possible. Verdict: also unlikely. 3) Thomas shoots and the stage lights go out. We assume Craig and Pia die but he misses. Maybe the bullet accidentally hits someone else out of sight – an Archduke Franz Ferdinand character – and that’s where the cataclysm starts. I’m currently favouring that one. Anyone else got any ideas?

Typical – having said I didn’t like the play I’ve just spent ages discussing it. I think the characterisations and the unanswered questions to do with what it was all about are intriguing. It was just the speech patterns that sent me into a spin. And some very repetitive conversations too: if I counted the number of times someone was asked a question and the answer was a frustrated “I don’t know!!”, well, I’d run out of digits, that’s for sure. I’m sure it accounted for at least half of Alex’s lines.

Let’s talk about the set instead. Wow, the set! I think it took everyone’s breath away when it was fully revealed. Centre stage, a collapsed road dangling out of nowhere, its steel rods poking through and falling pathetically to earth. Upstage right, a platform for keeping a lookout, but more likely where Craig will hang out and feel superior. Underneath the platform, a hidden area that’s probably where everyone sleeps. Underneath the road, various bits of debris that have been assembled that might be of use in survival. Sarah June Mills has done a superb job in creating an extremely atmospheric and totally believable set – perfect for the play and practical for the performers. It also fitted perfectly with Charlotte Burton’s lighting; at times atmospheric, at times vivid; the road catching the blue light (hence creating The Blue Road) was an arresting sight.

I thought this was a very tough play for a young cast to get their teeth into but, as always, they rose to the challenge. Eleanor Bilson’s Pia was a strong characterisation of an essentially kind, reasonable, tolerant person driven out of her wits by appalling circumstances; technically flawless and great to watch. Kieran Peace was sullenly menacing as Craig, and carried off his rather evil personality extremely well, especially with the death of Billy the Bird. Tabitha Brown played the bossy Maja with great relish; it was enjoyable to see how unpleasant she made the character without ever becoming the “baddie” – a very nicely balanced performance. John Reed was excellent at creating a sympathetic character out of the simple Thomas, and also delivered perfectly the unexpectedly hilarious line: “it’s not very gender neutral!” (OK, so there were some good lines too, he admits, slightly begrudgingly.) From the ensemble, Martin Delos Santos Beach stood out for me as being a fine actor, delivering his lines with great authority and clarity. But the entire cast put in a sterling performance and absolutely made the best of the material. There were a couple of instances of rather tentative prop-handling; but that’s just a question of time and practice. On the night we went, a mobile phone went off, quite loudly, a few times, but it didn’t faze the cast one iota – good work.

All in all, it was a very good production and performance of a play that did raise some interesting issues but irritated more than entertained me. Well done to the cast though – the packed audience was very appreciative!

Production photos by Graeme Braidwood