Once and For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen

Youthful mayhem on stage

The title of the Flemish show tackling the difficult world of adolesence, ‘One and For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen’, is ‘spot on’. The style of this theatre is raw and confrontational, theatre that pulls no punches.

The show is the brainchild of director Alexander Devriend, who successfully brought his show, ‘The Smile Off Your Face’, to the 2009 Sydney Festival. With this show his goal was to create a work of theatre that represented the world of adolescence accurately, and unromantically, on stage. With this in mind, he brought together a group of thirteen adolescent performers and worked with them in rehearsals over a one year period to create the work. The culmination is a show that the director describes as, ‘a celebration of the destructive forces of teenagedom. The brutality of that age: I never saw it depicted in any form, I didn’t find it shown in any positive way. This play is about looking at all this in a good way’.

Devriend’s staging is simple,-stretched across the stage are thirteen chairs. Prior to the show starting we hear sounds of teenagers arguing and being raucous from the wings …then they stream on to the stage and sit down on the chairs. What follows is a collection of scenes; to a comic ballet, to loud dance and rock music, there’s a dazed out drug scene, also a scene without performers, with only props thrown on stage from the wings. At times during the show, that runs just under one hour, one of the performers comes to the front centre of the stage and talks frankly to the audience.

It is one of the performers who unlocks the key with her address to the audience, “I have no choice you see. I have to go too far. Everything has been done before, but not by me, and not now’. The show rests on a trusted old maxim, that experience is the best and often the only genuine teacher!

Summing up, this was totally committed theatre. The teen performers do go all the way and even further, even at one time egging the audience on to do the same!

Alexander Devriendt’s production has already been highly acclaimed, and well travelled. After receiving a number of awards at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the show has played New York, Los Angeles and Montreal. The show is playing the Wharf 2 theatre at the Sydney Theatre Company until August 29.