Seventeen

From ‘Grease’ to ‘Dawson’s Creek’, there is a noble tradition of dramas about teenagers featuring slightly too long-in-the-tooth actors.

Matthew Whittet’s ‘Seventeen’, however, is not a play in which twenty-somethings try to pass as teens – the cast members are all proudly north of 50.

Why? Well, it becomes fairly apparent that in this show – reworked by Anne-Louise Sarks from her original Australian production – we’re supposed to see parallels between a gang of 17-year-olds looking back on their school years wistfully and actual old people looking back on the entire span of their lives. 

I’m not sure it really amounts to anything very profound, and I couldn’t totally shake the feeling that the casting more pertinently serves to distract from a script that might have been on the hackneyed side if it was performed by actual youngsters.

That’s not entirely a bad thing, though. The cast are, to an actor, first rate. More than that, they don’t ham it up (well not a lot, anyway) and allow the crises of this little group of teens (everyone fancies Roger Sloman’s shy, clever Tom, and it causes problems, basically) to seem important and serious, not smirking and adult-like. There’s also a lovely set from Tom Scutt, a playground climbing frame shaped like an infinity symbol.

It’s very well done, basically, and made me wonder how good ‘Dawson’s Creek’ might have been if they’d just cut the crap and cast sixty-something stage veterans. But it doesn’t quite have a point to make, either as a drama or a formal experiment, and as a result it drifts.