To reminisce is to stir up ghosts; there is something uncanny about the act of remembering. Playwright Matthew Whittet taps directly into the strangeness but also the joy of deep recollection with Seventeen, a play that encourages a kind of exhumation of former selves, on stage and in the audience. Its genius lies in its dual aspect, the way it is haunted by the future as much as the past.
We open in a children’s playground, a setting that should be trite but that reveals hidden layers of meaning. School’s out forever as the cast of characters gather to celebrate their matriculation, drink too much, pash each other and fret about their prospects. It would be too quotidian but for the central conceit: these 17-year-olds are played by actors decades older, some in their 70s.
The most boisterous and belligerent of the group is Mike (Richard Piper), who is dating Jess (Pamela Rabe) but seems keen to get pissed with best mate Tom (Robert Menzies) rather than work on his relationship. Tom is Mike’s slightly morose, less confident foil – his biggest problem is a looming move to Adelaide with his parents. Emilia (Genevieve Picot) is Jess’s best friend: smart, impervious and secretly holding a candle for Tom. Ronny (George Shevtsov) is the outsider, ostensibly homeless but keen to forget that for a single night. Rounding out the group is Mike’s little sister Lizzy (Fiona Choi), bursting with enthusiasm.
Director Matt Edgerton gets a lot of initial mileage out of the raucous, teetering energy of adolescence; there’s an explosive sense of exhilaration about these kids, a wildness unloosening. If this were all, though, it wouldn’t be enough. Thankfully, Whittet and Edgerton have something more intricate and elegiac in mind. As their uncertain futures loom, and they begin to realise how precipitous their situations have become, the characters fall into deeper contemplation and the work tilts towards profundity.
One of Whittet’s main concerns with Seventeen is the telescopic nature of time, the way it stretches or narrows depending on the view. For these kids, the gap of time between the ages of 11 and 17 is monstrous; for the audience, who are for the most part closer in age to the actors than the characters, it’s a tiny blip. We might carry our 17-year-old selves inside us throughout our lives – and the slightest bump can ricochet us back to our formative years as if the interim never happened – but the ravages of time are written on our faces. The dawn that comes for us is tinged with death, rather than potential.
All of which makes the play sound ponderous and philosophical, where really it is mercurial and charming. The cast are uniformly excellent, their performances spirited and poignant. Rabe and Picot brilliantly convey young women reluctant to embrace their own power, but forceful and determined enough to know they want more. Choi is wonderful as the firecracker Lizzy, shooting her enthusiasm into the sky.
The boys are beautifully shambolic, too. Mike is something of a bully at first, but Piper allows glints of doubt and regret to pierce the bluster. Menzies uses his natural hangdog expression to convey a grand bewilderment – with girls and choices and life in general. Shevtsov is quietly heartbreaking as the boy othered by circumstance, impossibly vulnerable and alone.
Christina Smith’s set and costumes are simple and bold, that playground revolving so slowly it’s almost imperceptible. This has a practical application – the static nature of the play equipment is given interest and variability – but also thematic implications: the days spin fast, but as we stand in them they can seem to hardly move at all. Paul Jackson’s lighting is strong, with an exquisite final image of the golden dawn breaking, pushing the play into allegory.
Whittet hasn’t really created contemporary kids here – these characters are too naive and inexperienced to evoke today’s highly connected, savvy youth – and Edgerton wisely avoids aping current idioms and attitudes. The goal isn’t to construct an anthropological view of modern youth culture. Rather, Seventeen aims to summon our own, obscured teenage selves, and to grapple with the mystifying allure and trap of memory itself.
That playground, inhabited by teenagers far too old for its juvenile pleasures – and played in turn by actors far too old for their own milieu – comes to seem like the holding place for our youth. In his novel The Go-Between, LP Hartley wrote: “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. Whittet might just disagree: the past may be another country, but its ways and contours are eerily familiar and they linger long after the blush has faded. Maybe we’ll always be 17 – on a cusp, frightened but elated, and fully alive.
Seventeen is on at the Melbourne Theatre Company, Sumner theatre, until 17 February.
