Teenage Dick by Mike Lew is a brilliant play and director Dan Graham’s production is superb.
Lew takes elements of Shakespeare’s treatment of Richard III and places the action in a modern American high school.
Like Shakespeare’s Richard, Lew’s protagonist has a disability that pushes him to the periphery. Both characters respond by focusing on the pursuit of power. Shakespeare was clearly exploiting the Elizabethan fascination with the Machiavellian villain, and Lew’s play makes that explicit: the students are asked to discuss The Prince. Is it better to be feared than loved?
Dean Nash as Richard is absolutely magnificent, a mesmerising stage presence. (I suspect Richard Burbage, the original Richard in Shakespeare’s company, would be thrilled by what Nash does.) Graham provides Nash with a wonderful supporting cast. Chloe Ho as Anne Margaret offers a deeply moving portrait of vulnerability. Rocco Forrester is terrific as the self-obsessed school jock, Eddie. Holly-Jane Cohle’s Buck is gloriously no-nonsense wit. Amy Victoria Brooks, in a performance both hilarious and disturbing, nails the hapless teacher, Miss York.
The character names evoke Shakespeare’s play and, if you’re familiar with the Elizabethan text, the conversation between this play and the earlier one is intriguing. But no knowledge of Shakespeare is required.
This is an extraordinarily timely play. We live in an era in which some of us so passionately strive to right previously unacknowledged injustices that we valorise rage and grant ourselves moral holidays. Richard desperately wants power because he’s so denied it, but are the means he chooses defensible? Are they even effective? This play does what theatre is made to do: honestly present the fracture lines in our vision of Life.
Shakespeare called his play a tragedy. Lew’s extraordinarily powerful final scene leaves us asking if his is too.
Paul Gilchrist
Teenage Dick by Mike Lew
Presented by Flight Path Theatre & Divergent Theatre Collective
At Flight Path until 5 August
Image by Andrea Magpulong
Theatre Red 