Brilliant capture of teen emotion

(Royal Exchange, Manchester)

It was just over a year ago at this theatre, with “You Can See The Hills”, that Oldhamer Matthew Dunster gave us the second great schooldays play of modern times — the first being Alan Bennett’s “The History Boys”.

Now Stockport’s Olivier award-winning playwright Simon Stephens gives us the third.

“Punk Rock” is punctuated by bursts of loud rock, but its 110 unbroken minutes are about teenagers at a Stockport private school — the same charged, out-of-sync, middle-class kids who actually created much of the punk scene, hence the title.

While Stephens hasn’t quite created the masterpiece anyone reading the London critics’ reviews might believe — the work is a little cliche-driven in its themes and development — there is no doubt that its Columbine-style violence towards the end packs a powerful punch.

After all, over the previous hour or so we have come to like most of the 17-year-old, A-level-sitting teens in an intense, highly-detailed portrait of teenage angst in extremis.

Where Stephens excels is in the detail: though his characters are stereotypes — pretty newcomer Lilly, prospective earth-mother Tanya, soon-to-be anorexic high-flyer Cissy, intense loner William, sneering bully Bennett, lacrosse jock Nicholas and young genius Chadwick — he writes them all with highly-believable dialogue, feelings and emotions.

In your teens you are never more alive, never more intense, never happier and never deeper in despair — usually all in the same day. The resulting cruelty, the testing of life’s social and sexual order, is what Stephens captures brilliantly, enhanced by Sarah Frankcom’s smart, unfussy direction.

In Manchester the pared-down set — the first run, in London, had an ornate Gothic student library, this a grotty room with plastic chairs — intensifies the performances and dialogue strongly, making the brilliant stage debut of Tom Sturridge as William all the more heartbreakingly tragic, the fate of three of his classmates glaringly focused and matter-of-fact.

Performances are strong from everyone concerned, but Sturridge stays strongest in the mind as a young man whose loneliness and borderline sanity and pushed over the edge by a chain of crushing disappointments.

Powerful, clever, funny and cruel: how do we ever survive our teens?

PG