Same as it ever was
The show that I went to see tonight was called Punkplay and was performed on rollerskates. But wait — don’t leave.
I’ve been grinning about it all the way home.
I mean, it was shoddy as fuck. Really scrappy. It reminded me of this Stranger Things spoof that I saw the other day (this one), like it was the joke version of the real play. The set was shit and doors kept opening the wrong way or swinging wide when they weren’t supposed to, the mic stand kept falling over and everyone was tripping and fucking up all the time. It had started with all four cast trying to squeeze massive helium balloons through two tiny doorways, and the accents were ropey and all the costumes were just a bit… wrong. It was meant to be set in the mid-80s but all the period details had gone completely to fuck: 90s circular rave shades with too-big jeans. Proper dressing up box stuff. One of the fight scenes — on ROLLERSKATES, lest you forget — got tangled up with strands of the tinsel curtain. So for a while I was thinking to myself ‘hooooo boy they’ve got a lot of work to do before press night’, but then the two leads got their band together and it suddenly started to fall into place: if this was a show about punk, it needed to test the definition of punk. I mean, I’m pretty sure one guy did a whole scene from a wheelchair because he’d never really bothered to learn how to skate. Punk is as punk does m8.
Underneath all the teenage coming of age shit — blow jobs, backstabbing, misogyny, homophobia — there was also something really well observed about displacement, sort of connected to the shit-on-purpose design. Surely every teenager ever at some point wishes they were older; old enough to go to x, old enough to get into y. Or they wish they’d been born in another decade, when fashion and music was really real, more ‘authentic’ when really they mean more cinematic. But all those romantic imaginings are built on falsehood. Punkplay is listed as part of the current UK anniversary of punk season thingy — a fucking atrocity of a heritage festival, the worst thing ever, the thing that made Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s son vow to burn all his original memorabilia — and yet it’s about American teenagers a full 10+ years after the British punk scene broke. The era and the geography is as ill-fitting as the clothes, but that’s the genius of it. It’s about the timeless, endlessly repeating disjointedness that teenagers experience as they try to work out who they are by listening to records and being total cunts to each other.
After all that, the real punks are the ones who never quite fit into the nostalgic moulds because they are the pioneers, utterly of their time, of the future even. I’m not going to tell you what happens at the very end of Punkplay, partly because it should take you by surprise and partly because it’s nothing major really, a joyful little postscript, but it was the moment where that ephemeral concept of ‘punk’ — a nonsense word really, as much what it isn’t as what it is — solidified into a recognisable symbol of true creative independence, of own-furrow-ploughing brilliance, and of the togetherness that can be found in difference.
Loved it.
