A droll study of the arrogance, and cluelessness, of youth
Speech and Debate Trafalgar Studios, London ★★★★ ★
Stephen Karam officially became the Great New Hope of American drama in 2016 with The Humans, which won the Tony Award for Best Play and ran on Broadway until last month (a postelection Hillary Clinton caught it at the final performance). We have to hope that his reportedly revelatory slice of domestic life will cross the pond soon.
In the meantime, the Trafalgar Studios plays host to the UK premiere of an earlier effort, from 2006: Speech and Debate, due to emerge in April in a screen incarnation. A slightly grabbier – and hardly less accurate – title might be The Aliens, seeing as how it comically unfolds the mysteries and peculiarities of today’s youth.
Tom Attenborough’s production begins with the chiselled sight of Howie (Douglas Booth – whose Pip was famously judged as prettier than Estella in the BBC’s 2011 Great Expectations) engaging in a witty, flirtatious online chatroom exchange with an older man. It emerges that this predatory figure is his high-school drama teacher Mr Healy.
The suggestion of suspect behaviour is seized on by nerdish student-rag reporter Solomon, who’s also alert to the closet gay peccadillos of the Republican mayor. Completing the trio of teen students who are thrown together (in a rather unlikely fashion) in the “Speech and Debate” club of their school (North Salem High, Oregon) is Diwata. This drolly self-deprecating vlogger uploads bedroom-made videos venting her annoyance at Healy for not casting her in the school production (“Once Upon a Mattress”) and her yen to do a onewoman revisionist musical of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
Karam has spoken ahead of the film about the characters’ need to “push through their pain” in a quest for “some laughs and love”. If that sounds vague, I think it sums up the bagginess of the 90-minute piece, which jolts forward in a series of offbeat scenes that take their (projected) subtitles from debating formats and exercises (“Extemporaneous Commentary”, “Declamation” and so on). The potentially witch-hunty fixation on (the never seen) Healy is a means of evading a lack of focus in their own lives; if it’s hard to understand who these young people are, and what they want, I think that’s the point.
It’s a challenging proposition for the cast (already contending – admirably, it should be said – with American accents): they have to embody the arrogance and complacent assurance of those who, enviably, have their whole lives ahead of them, mixed with raging hormones and self-doubt.
On the evidence presented here, Booth, making his West End debut, is supremely gifted with the ability to look full of himself yet gnawed from within by uncertainty (I already want to see his Hamlet). The transfixingly impish Patsy Ferran couldn’t be better as the headstrong, slightly crazed Diwata, her Casio keyboard her most loyal companion. Tony Revolori , who played the lobby boy in The Grand Budapest Hotel, is finding his feet in the role of Solomon (I caught this at its final preview) but, as with these endearingly clueless characters, it’s still early days.