11 – 14 January
Devised by the Bristol Old Vic Young Company, and triggered both by the experience of lockdown over the past two years and, more generally, by the way the adult world seeks to control young people’s behaviour, There’s Nobody Else In The World And The World Was Made For Me is a powerful piece of work.
In the world above there is chaos, with the authorities struggling to cope with social disorder. Down below, locked away in a bleak, decaying bunker, we find a group of teenagers undergoing an equally bleak ‘re-education’ programme. At school they committed a variety of misdemeanours, often of a trivial kind, defacing a desk, sticking a rude post-it note on a teacher’s back. Their punishment is to be buried away, isolated and out of sight.
Drawn from among their number, a hapless ‘facilitator’ has the thankless task of mechanistically delivering the trite behavioural lessons, earning him the scorn of his fellow pupils. Featuring crumbling walls and eight tatty chairs, Gi Vasey’s set design effectively underpins the kids’ sense of abandonment. When the bunker appears on the verge of collapsing in on them, their only means of escape is a decrepit lift, but the door is jammed…
The measures taken to control the pandemic were particularly hard on teenagers. Negotiating the challenges of adolescence can be tough enough, without having to endure isolation from friends. Lessons delivered via Zoom brought the world of the school straight into the home, creating a sense that there was no escape from the controlling gaze of teachers and parents. Teenagers need a space of their own, and Covid took that away. Often, when they finally returned to school, they found that the trauma they had experienced had not earned them any increased tolerance: ‘You don’t have to do much to get punished, but you have to do a whole lot more to be forgiven.’
Just under three months ago Director Harry Gould, together with Assistant Director Imogen Downes, gave their cast of fourteen young people, aged fourteen to twenty, a bare framework upon which to build this play, saying that it had to be about punishment and power, and had to address the issue of mental health. It might be thought that this would have resulted in some sort of tedious, self-pitying teenage whinge, but that is very far from the case. There’s Nobody Else In The World And The World Was Made For Me is certainly fuelled by an angry, visceral sense of injustice. But this group of talented young actors have created a fresh and imaginative piece of work, laced with healthy dollops of cheeky humour, and they perform it with infectious energy. It is occasionally a little rough around the edges, but too much polish would detract from its authenticity. It has a raw immediacy that is very moving. These youngsters should be very proud of what they have achieved.
★★★★☆ Mike Whitton, 13th January, 2023
Photo credit: Chelsey Cliff
