NST Nuffield Southampton Theatre’s Youth Theatre celebrated playwright and University of Southampton Creative Fellow and Lecturer Evan Placey, with his play Consensual. Two BA (Hons) English students attended the play – here’s what they thought.
Abigail Rumney – I do not write for the Gatekeepers…
I have never been to a play that made me face such distressing events, in such close quarters, as the production of Consensual by Evan Placey at the Nuffield Theatre. The themes of the play (underage sex, rape, domestic abuse, and the contrasting sexual aggression and vulnerability of young people) were incredibly hard to watch on stage,as they are themes that have affected me personally in the past. I believe that most people experience a confused and ambiguous period between the ages of 15 and 17, where the theory of an age of consent and the reality of understanding and being ready to consent are disjointed. This was definitely the case for me. As with Freddie within the play, that grey area is also often further blurred through the inclusion of alcohol, the effects of which – to confuse and distort memory, perspective, and the ability to make decisions – are also touched upon by Placey. Even without a personal connection to the themes, the excellent writing by Placey meant that the characters were very easy to engage with and felt very true to the experience of sex education in school (one of the primary themes of the play). Placey writes deliberately to confront the audience with difficult events and questions that would normally be avoided, in order to provoke thought and potentially even debate. This effect of confrontation was emphasised by the production of the play, which confined the audience to a small section of the usual theatre, surrounding the stage on three sides. This setting meant that the action was occurring in very close proximity to the audience, making each member feel that much more involved and invested in the events unfolding before them.
As he told the audience at his ‘Writers in Conversation’ evening, Evan Placey primarily writes for youth theatre and wants to write about things that are normally considered taboo or too difficult for young people. I find his desire to provoke thought and questions about difficult issues, for an age group that is often thought of as needing restricted access to disturbing content, highly unorthodox and interesting. Placey stated that he doesn’t write for the ‘gatekeepers’ (i.e. parents, teachers etc.) but with young people in mind. I can understand the apprehension of such ‘gatekeepeers’ and I believe that theirs is a fairly common response to plays that draw attention to taboo or uncomfortable topics; however, I agree with Placey that it is important to raise these issues for people to think about rather than pretend they don’t exist. It could be said that the doomed attempts of ‘gatekeepers’ to protect young people from difficult topics is actually worse for them. It is surely better to equip young minds with the knowledge to deal with such issues, rather than leave them in the dark or having to depend on less reliable sources.
During the interview Placey described how he tries to engage people without immediately putting them off with the issues in his plays; he stressed the importance of good characterisation to engage and move the audience with the characters’ emotional plight, allowing a seed to be planted which may change the audience’s minds or simply get them thinking. It seems to me that this idea is key to tackling difficult topics; rather than attempting to set out a concrete moral judgement as used to be the case in traditional morality plays, the issues or dilemmas are simply brought to the audience’s attention and explored. This allows the often-young audience to actually think about the issues and form an opinion, rather than become defensive or reactionary to a moral judgement, which the so called gatekeepers might wish Placey included. As Placey himself said, no one watches a play about drugs and then never takes them, simply because the play told them not to. He is right; difficult issues are just that, difficult, they cannot be tackled and solved so simply.
Emily Fry – Not writing for the Gatekeepers, but writing a gateway to better understanding…
Although it is now going back a little while since I was in secondary school, I can remember all too well the look of apprehension that painted itself across the faces of my teachers in our Sex Education lessons. Understandably, a lot of these teachers resorted to putting on a video to avoid the humiliating task of discussing sexual reproduction to a group of teens with raging hormones. The most troubling fact from my own experiences however was that it was the pre-pubescent teens who seemed to be the most knowledgeable about these matters, rather than the teachers. Students would often laugh their way through these sessions, challenging one another to see who could make the most explicit remarks, failing to see the serious nature of the matter at hand.
Adults have a tendency to censor impressionable teens – becoming what playwright Evan Placey refers to as the “gatekeepers.” It was during Evan Placey’s Writers in Conversation, on the 13th of February, that I became introduced to this notion. I couldn’t agree more with what Placey began to discuss during this event: the more we attempt to censor, and perhaps even suppress, teenage sexuality, the more teenagers will search for other means to get answers to the questions they have been prevented from asking. It is due to the influence of pornographic content that so many teenagers now have unrealistic expectations of sex. As demonstrated in Placey’s most recent play Consensual, educators now find it virtually impossible to equip young people with a sensitive and appropriate understanding of Sex Education. It is now more important than ever that we are open about these issues; theatre is a fantastic medium through which we can be.
The fiercely talented cast from the Nuffield Youth Theatre depict this same dynamic between the pupils and teachers with gritty realism. Consensual provides a painstakingly honest portrayal of how professionals, such as teaching assistants, tend to find themselves way out of their depth in leading classes with hyper-sexualised teenagers. I could not help but sympathise with my teachers looking back on this and how incompetent they must have felt when pupils mentioned various euphemisms that they had never heard before, let alone understood. The main source of comic relief in Consensual is the scenes in which a sheltered teaching assistant is confronted with the sexually explicit attitudes of a pupil who openly confides in her about her sex-life and the phenomenon of BDSM. It is very telling that this pupil references E.L James’s 50 Shades of Grey: ultimately our culture’s unwillingness to publicly discuss sex has resulted in people of all ages resorting to erotic and fictive representations of sexuality. Like Placey himself, I began to question whether the current forms of Sex Education that are put in effect are sufficient to advise pupils, and equip teachers with the necessary skills. The subplot of Consensual demonstrates the consequences of these inadequacies: the teaching assistant fails to recognise the signs that her pupil is in an abusive relationship, since she conceals this truth by saying she is speaking about “her friend.”
One thing that really struck me when watching Consensual was the misconception bred in my own experiences of Sex Education. I cannot remember a single video which I was shown at secondary school that didn’t exclusively feature male actors as the predator attempting to groom or prey upon younger people. Statistically speaking, reports indicate that approximately 96% of those who are the perpetrators of sexual abuse are male, thus it is only a minority of females who are the perpetrators of such offences. Again, it is the sheer talent of Evelyn Blackwell (Diane) and Laurie McNamara (Freddie) that assists Placey in seizing the opportunity to challenge the prominent misconceptions regarding consent, namely that it is a gender exclusive issue. The compelling choreography during the sex scene which separates both Blackwell and McNamara on either end of the stage, even as they share in this intimate experience, visually reinforces that a teacher and pupil should never cross boundaries to be involved with one another. As an audience, we too experience Diane’s torment as she tries to remember exactly what happened on that night with Freddie, and whether she is guilty of making inappropriate advances towards a pupil. Is Diane guilty of grooming a pupil even if she was not intent on doing so?
Consensual is a fantastic show which explores the grey areas concerning consent: at what age are teenagers mature enough to decide they are ready to engage in sexual activity, and, regardless of whether a young adult may believe they are ready, are they exempt from being taken advantage of? Ultimately what Evan Placey evidences is that we are all still capable of receiving an education about teenage sexuality. We all have something to learn.
