“Lucie Lutte superbly directs a cast with great verve and cohesion, limited only by a script which doesn’t grasp the issue of PREVENT as comprehensively as hoped”
As someone who attended an inner-city state school where the PREVENT campaign was in operation, often right under our noses, I was keen to see this iteration of Anders Lustgarten’s play, Extremism, which attempts to grapple with the shortfalls and harm caused by the PREVENT campaign. Performed at the Cockpit Theatre, it’s produced by Limitless Presents, a company doing crucial work to increase access to theatre. That commitment is felt thoroughly here, with founder Lucy Lutte directing Extremism with great care and responsibility for her cast, who bring the performance to life with a vitality that brings the audience head-on into the lives of these pupils, like many pupils across the country living under the campaign. It’s a brilliant show to watch for these performances and Lutte’s direction, but the story carries some discrepancies that limit how thoroughly it scrutinises the controversial policy.
The dramatisation of the situation disguises how much the PREVENT campaign operates largely behind closed doors. Young people are seldom given resources, such as Liberty’s Prevent: What Are My Rights?, to understand PREVENT and their rights and obligations in relation to it. Instead, PREVENT operates largely through home visits and the CPS. The set-up of the narrative misses the stealth of the campaign in favour of a more heightened narrative, which makes the issue more opaque and easier to direct our attention towards. It’s a common act of theatre, and affords this play some good teachable moments, such as the students discussing the government’s access to personal data. There’s no harm in making this clear, but the reduced subtlety loses some of the full picture of how policies that criminalise children can work largely by retaining the ignorance of the children they are targeting.
The children in this play are very intelligent and socially aware, in ways which we can pick up on easily as an audience. Writing teenagers is a difficult task without resorting to American high school archetypes, which Lustgarten’s play occasionally does. The actors do a great job injecting their own chemistry and attitude into the script, bringing more livelihood to the Croydon state school we see on stage before us. It could have been more interesting to see the big topics and beliefs of these young people play out more through the subtext of how they speak to each other, which we see in brief moments in the script, before refocusing directly on the issue.
Lucy Lutte’s direction gives the play great verve, and she handles her cast very well. The space of the classroom is generally imagined quite effectively, with the audience sat around in a scrutinising position. The actors do a tremendous job of upping the stakes throughout their performances, and their dynamic as a company thrives, creating great tension in the space. Shukri Hassan is a standout in her performance as Suhayla. Suhayla’s resilience feels really lived-in, and Hassan manages to maintain it unwaveringly, even when she is being attacked in a particularly tough moment in the play. Charlie French also gives a great performance as Chris, with plenty of angst and nerve. The whole cast come together to give a great breadth of response to the incident, and Lutte’s direction certainly helps with that.
The play loses some of its clarity towards the end, which isn’t entirely a drawback. It’s an opportunity to show the youth of these characters, their fear and confusion in the face of their own authority, and the reality of hierarchy as the classroom descends into chaos. But some of the characters’ motivations are unclear, making some of the betrayals unconvincing.
A particular limitation of this piece is the ending, which rests in the hands of Darren (Llewy Godfrey), who up until this point has been speaking Klingon, with his words translated through the character of Olive (Akira Dias), who otherwise doesn’t get enough opportunity to shine on her own. The content of Darren’s speech does tap appropriately into the way PREVENT capitalises on the fear of young people and adults alike; the students panicking over their “personal record” is a good touch. However, the choice to have Darren give this speech feels misjudged, particularly as the speech directs attention away from the ways in which PREVENT specifically targets Muslim children towards his character’s own fears about not being good enough or not being loved.
It’s understandable to want to capture a wider understanding of fear, but the way in which this happens does not do justice to Suhayla, who at this point has lost her words entirely. Giving a character like Darren the power to end this play feels unearned and drives the story towards more of a saviour narrative.
Lutte and her cast do an excellent job with the material. The play is vibrant, and beneath the interpersonal disputes of their characters, there’s a real sense of camaraderie amongst the cast which reverberates through their performances. It would be wonderful to see them work with material that has a stronger comprehension of the lives of inner-city state school students and the way PREVENT interacts with them with far more stealth.
This show ran at the Cockpit Theatre.