The first sight of Alecky Blythe’s new play, Our Generation, comes via a trailer on YouTube, which seems apt for a drama that aspires to take the pulse of today’s teenagers. Out it pours in the words of 12 young people from across the UK, whose comic ups and touching downs have been meticulously recorded over five years, with every stumble and repetition left intact. “I’m an only child, it’s just me, my mum, my cat, my dog and my deceased chicken,” explains one girl. Another frets: “I have a really itchy roof of my mouth. I think I have hay fever. I’ve gotta be at 100% health so I can watch Love Island.” Yet another bubbles: “I wanna go hajj so bad. And Australia. I wanna get a tan.”
A play by Blythe has become a bit of an event – ever since, weary of trying to find an agent, the home counties-born actor turned to writing in an attempt to jump-start her stalled career. She specialises in verbatim pieces, created from recorded interviews, applying the same listening skills to scenarios as wildly various as the 2011 London riots, a talent contest in Stoke-on-Trent and a brothel for mature women in Bournemouth. “I got to a stage where I wasn’t getting much acting work, and I fell in love with [writing verbatim plays], because, well, you couldn’t make it up,” she says. “As an actor, I found real joy in the fact that you could play parts that maybe you wouldn’t normally play. It really opens up your range. And I discovered that I could do it.”
For Our Generation, which opens at the National Theatre in London this month, she and a team of other “collectors” with voice recorders gathered nearly 600 hours of testimony from interviewees in London, Birmingham, Northamptonshire, Anglesey, Glasgow and Belfast. They set out expecting the dramatic shape of the piece to follow that of the secondary school years, with its familiar waypoints of success or failure in exams. But they were ambushed by the pandemic, with the fortuitous result that its 254 scenes reveal how a generation has coped with prolonged stress.
Seven weeks into rehearsals, Blythe and director Daniel Evans bustle into an interview room at the top of the National with the sort of adrenalised energy that comes from keeping a rehearsal schedule going on a road littered with the tintacks of positive Covid tests. The first three previews have been cancelled, and the 15-strong cast have only this morning started to rehearse without earphones. They don’t work from scripts but learn everything by copying the original speakers, piped directly into their ears, with Evans finding the dramatic shape while Blythe is ready to pounce every time they forget an “um” or fumble an “err”. It sounds like a form of torture to me, but they insist that even actors who are at first terrified usually come to love it.
Perhaps surprisingly for a connoisseur of those unintentional wrinkles in conversation that reveal so much, Blythe’s own speech is as crisp and smooth as a freshly ironed sheet, unfolding in eloquent paragraphs as Evans sits quietly listening. There are two traditions of verbatim theatre: one, pioneered at Kilburn’s Tricycle theatre (now Kiln theatre) in London, uses pre-existing transcripts of trials or inquiries. Blythe, working in a tradition pioneered by the US actor Anna Deavere Smith and the British teacher/director Mark Wing-Davey, takes all her material from face-to-face interviews. When Blythe first started writing, her plays were performed with earphones still on: actors repeated, in real time, speech that was being piped directly into their ears.
Her first play, premiered in 2003, was about a 15-day police siege in Hackney, east London, that ended with the death of 32-year-old Jamaican gangster Eli Hall. Pushing her way to the front of a police cordon, she picked up her title – Come Out Eli – from the chant of the people crowding outside, some of whom she went on to interview. Some reviewers felt uncomfortable about how exposed the method left her interviewees (“The technique of recreating the voices of the witnesses often makes people – whether absurdly posh or desperately inarticulate – just sound stupid,” grumbled one). But many more recognised that she had found a new way of giving a voice to one of London’s most diverse communities. “That play ended up being quite successful, and I got a literary agent off the back of it,” says Blythe. “So I went in a different direction. And for a little while, I was both writing them and performing in them.”
That changed with her brothel play, The Girlfriend Experience, which ran in 2008 at the Royal Court. “The style changed slightly in that I was casting it more to type, and I wasn’t really the right type for any of the parts. It was the first time I stepped back and was just the writer. I really enjoyed it because I could commit to it a lot more.” She made a return to the stage for Little Revolution, though, a snapshot of the 2011 London riots, in which she played herself in a dramatised scary encounter with a group of looters, who had spotted her taking photographs. The situation could have been disastrous but, after checking her camera for incriminating images, they had let her go.
Our Generation marks Blythe’s first return to the National Theatre since 2011, when she pushed her work into a new musical dimension with the award-winning London Road. It was only when then NT director Nicholas Hytner said he wouldn’t produce a play with actors using earphones that she took the leap of abandoning them midway through rehearsals.
Dealing with the aftermath of a string of serial killings in the Ipswich area in the 00s, this collaboration with composer Adam Cork was later made into a film. It worked the hesitations into astonishingly effective repeating choruses: “Everyone is very very nervous … UM … and very unsure of everything … BASICALLY.” The Guardian’s Michael Billington was among those who saluted London Road as fresh and revelatory. “Conventional musicals, even at their best, take us into a world of fantasy,” he wrote. “This miraculously innovative show finds a new way of representing reality.”
Though Our Generation isn’t a musical, Evans was chosen to direct it because of his musicality. He is also artistic director of Chichester Festival theatre, which became a partner in the production, and will stage the show immediately after the NT. What was it that piqued his interest? “Well, I’ve been in some musicals, and I’ve directed some musicals,” he says, with an understatement that sends Blythe into a peal of laughter. As an actor, he is one of the UK’s most successful Sondheim specialists, winning Oliviers for his roles in both Merrily We Roll Along and Sunday in the Park With George. As a director, he has demonstrated a populist flair, with award-winning productions ranging from Oliver! and My Fair Lady to The Full Monty.
“And I’m Welsh,” he says. “I think the Welsh bit is important. People always bang on about the tune of our accent, so I grew up with an awareness of how I sound, and this has taken it to a whole new level.” He takes a particular pride in some of the language the play’s two characters from north Wales come up with. “What, you mean the ‘My nails are longer than my future’ line?” asks Blythe. “Well there’s that,” replies Evans, before soaring off into a sentence so gloriously filthy it’s unprintable. “It’s just how language is relished unconsciously by people,” he says. “It’s very, very sensuous, I think, without them even knowing that they’re being sensuous.”
Their vivacity, Evans points out, is all the more impressive from a generation growing up after decades of cuts, which mean they wouldn’t have the chance he had, as a talented child actor from the south Wales valleys, to have music and drama classes financed by the local authority. “There’s a character towards the end of the play,” he adds, sadly, “who says, ‘We’ve been left in the rubble.’”
Blythe is acutely aware of her responsibilities to her young interviewees, who were all invited with their families to a taster preview on the understanding that anything they felt uncomfortable with would get the chop. “It’s really important to make sure that we are representing them as truthfully as possible, because they’ve been so generous as to give us a portion of their lives,” she says.
It says something about the rapport developed between interviewees and collectors that only one interviewee dropped out over the five years, even though some of them found themselves dealing with disappointments and traumas they could never have anticipated. But it’s not all hardship. “There are others who are succeeding in sports and in academia in an immense way,” points out Evans.
“Plus there’s romance,” adds Blythe. “You know, falling in love, falling out of love. Sex. Yeah. Drugs. Yes. What is remarkable about this group of people is that, despite everything, they still have hope.”
• Our Generation is at the National Theatre, London, 14 February to 9 April and at Chichester Festival theatre 22 April to 14 May.
