An exploration of race and colonial legacy collapses under the weight of its own ambition
Each year since 1995, the National Theatre’s Connections Festival has commissioned new plays for performance by youth theatre groups across the country. 13-19 year olds are inextricably involved at every stage of the process – from workshopping with the writers to running tech at the performance – which promises stories hyper-relevant to British teenagers and rarely seen on the stage. This year’s iteration involves over 6000 young people across 33 theatres, tackling issues such as wellbeing, introversion, the desirability of success, and anxiety.
Mojisola Adebayo’s Wind/Rush Generation(s) is incredibly ambitious in both its scope and its staging. A confronting narrative tackles racial injustice and colonialism in the UK, framed through a group of university students communicating with a ghost via Ouija board. Scenes shift between extended monologues from this ghost, vignettes illustrating the legacy of racial discord in modern Britain, and the séance itself.
The youth tech crew also have their work cut out for them, with complex lighting, sound and visual cues to get right. Projections are used not just for scene-setting, but also to embody the messages sent via the Ouija board, and to punctuate the timeline of historic injustices with news headlines and protest signs.
If this sounds like a lot to cover, that’s because it is. At times, Wind/Rush Generation(s) can feel like two hours’ worth of enticing morsels compressed into a dense, hour-long block that’s hard to get your teeth into. The scenes at the Ouija board are intriguing but barely fleshed-out, and there is too long of a gap between them for the disconnected vignettes to feel particularly congruent. A multitude of characters to keep track of, some played by more than one actor, contribute to the narrative’s disjointed feel. The reality is, if Wind/Rush Generation(s) tried to do half as much – keeping only the most effective vignettes, trimming down the monologues, and allowing the present-day storyline to develop – it would be twice as effective.
This is a shame, because there are flashes of brilliance. A town-hall discussion about windfarms (or is it about immigration?) is intelligent and impactful; an extended scene where two teens play through a video game and shift into spoken-word poetry is compelling; a ship’s captain deciding to jettison his payload of slaves for the insurance money stirs emotion effectively. There are some excellent performances as well, particularly Murthad Abdalla, Ibtisam Ahmed and Taranpreet Singh. But each of these achievements compete against the noise of many more ideas, having the effect of muddying the waters and diminishing the impact of each individual moment.
Wind/Rush Generation(s) is grander in ambition than Replica the previous evening (review here), but also executed less effectively. At times, the closed captioning is necessary to follow the action onstage when a voice is not projected towards the audience; scene transitions feel protracted and unnecessary; and there is no pause between one impactful idea and the next. A good editor could trim this excess, focusing the play on its core themes and amplifying its message.
The result is an interesting, important, and challenging piece of theatre, but its strongest ideas get lost in the mix.
The Connections Festival runs each year across the country. Applications to take part in 2025 are currently open.