National Student Drama Festival 2009

My third NSDF, and possibly my favourite so far. That's partly because I was lucky enough to be awarded the Harold Hobson Student Drama Critic Award (mentioning it sounds almost unbearably arrogant, sorry).

The blog hasn't been updated lately because being in Scarborough for the Festival takes so much time (excuses). But here's an overview of NSDF09 that appeared (more or less like this) in the Festival's magazine, Noises Off:

It may be the conspicuous level of cuddly toys littering the NOFFice, or it may be the fact that Edinburgh University's The Last Yak is still on my mind, but the thought has suddenly seized me that this year's shows can be divided roughly equally into two camps: those that featured animals in some sense and those that avoided animal references almost entirely. The reasons behind favouring or avoiding animal references may have varied, but this still serves as a useful division of the shows gracing NSDF09.

As I type this, a monkey is eyeing me mockingly from the table. He's hardly one to mock, having bright blue fur, an orange face, lime green arms and red feet and ears. Freak. He's been left by the No Wonder company from Manchester, who've generously left all their cuddly toys in the NOFFice up for adoption as mascots. Mine is the smallest, ugliest one I could find. He's a bit of an outsider, being so freakish, but he still manages to maintain that cheeky grin plastered across his hideous, orange face. Which makes him a bit like Edward Franklin's character in No Wonder – the one that emerges from the wardrobe full of toy animals. Alright, so Franklin doesn't have a face that is hideous or orange, but his character is a bullied outsider, picked on because he's weedy and his dad's a bit weird. It's a play about the delusions people practice on each other and themselves – whether that's dressing up as Peter Pan or pretending that your husband will wake up from a coma. As in several other of this year's shows, there is an undercurrent of pain and violence in No Wonder; Franklin's young Luke self-harms when he can't cope with the outside world.

He's not the only one that struggles with the outside world this year; Manchester University's other entry – Herons – centres on characters struggling to escape external factors bearing down on their lives which make the eventual climax inevitable. Interestingly, Franklin crops up in this one as well, this time as a nasty thug who punishes insults with the repeated application of a glass bottle. Nice man. What Scott (Franklin) is defending with such brutality is his honour – this and a sparse set give Herons a feel of timelessness; it could almost be about any generation let down by its elders and disapproving of the upcoming generation. Simon Stephens' long, tense play wins the award for this year's most conspicuous use of animals in a title (100% animal!), though the herons are mentioned pretty infrequently in the script itself.

The absence of any actual herons in Herons is echoed in Warwick University's Elephant's Graveyard – another title to feature heavy use of an animal – but here the elephant is mentioned much more often. The thing with this elephant – Mary – is that she's actually pretty unimportant, so it's alright for her to become invisible. What matters in Elephant's Graveyard is the reaction of the ordinary people to the death of a stranger, who is also invisible. Were either of these figures to be seen, they would undoubtedly prove distracting to the overall message of this piece, which warns of the blood lust lurking in us all. Though Mary is in the title, she's not the thing to be watching for; there is a strong ensemble cast well worth watching instead of trying to imagine the elephant they're hanging badly.

The other Mary of the Festival this year is in a play bereft of animal references: the University of East Anglia's The Wake. Initially it looks as thought this is another Mary that will have to remain in our imaginations, until she pops up in the audience and turns Jonathan Brittain's shaky one-man show into a fast-paced two-hander. Like many of the shows featuring this year, it has characters onstage before the House opens though on this occasion he is invisibly lodged inside a coffin.

East Anglia's other entry – Olivia Vinall's Tub – is another show this year to have performers in place before the audience enters, and again the performer in question is invisible – this time inside the eponymous bathtub. Tub is a twenty-minute gem of a play, that leaves its audience free to make their own stories and background to a world apparently lacking in anchors.

The removal of anchors and stable points of reference are fundamental to Warwick Uni's other entry: Return to the Silence. This production – devoid of animals, if you ignore the golden retriever reference – literally disconnects its audience from normal conventions and swings them about the space in order to give some kind of impression of how delicate a thing mental health is.

Edinburgh University's production of Anthony Neilson's Normal is another show to feature a fractured and unhinged world, but this time it's liberal moral assumptions being called into question. The mental well-being of Peter Kurten (Paddy Loughman) is certainly under examination, but so is the society that produced him – much as is implicitly happening in Herons. Something Herons doesn't have is bestiality, which Kurten relishes. To continue the theme of prominent birds, Normal has a huge swan at the back of the stage, which has perhaps led to audiences making too much of the Nazi overtones in this production. What is important to Kurten is his explosive sexual desires, along with his physical appearance.

The three characters featured in the University of Hull's Never Enough also have hidden desires that bubble dangerously to the surface when they are thrown together. These desires are largely sexual – as with Kurten in Normal – but also touch on materialism, physical appearance and food. Never Enough explores all three of its characters with roughly equal stage time and a fair amount of constructive borrowing from different dance styles.

In another example of beautifully-held balance between different characters, Dartington's Vowel Play depicts four women telling stories about their lives through microphones, possibly as background dialogue for a radio play. The quirk in Joe Richards' script is that each character may use only one vowel. The joy of Joe Richards' script is the ways in which language is forced to adapt and change to accommodate new circumstances, highlighting the immense versatility (and often musicality)of the English language.

Language also forms an important feature of Giggleswick School's Sad Since Tuesday, which features angels speaking in rhyming couplets and several characters of foreign extraction with requisite accents. The chicken wings of the angels, and the chicken huts on stage (one for the band, one for Tom Coxon's angel) help shunt this into the 'Using Animal References' category that I'm using to distinguish shows this year. While showcasing huge creative potential, this show also demonstrates how important a guiding hand can be in the rehearsal process; Sad Since Tuesday wants its rough edges smoothing over. Among the strongest aspects of this production is design, which has an aesthetic pleasantry that slides it neatly alongside the film version of A Matter of Life and Death.

Another piece paying great attention to design is the final piece of the pro-animal category (and is another to feature animal references in its title): Edinburgh University's second entry, The Last Yak. Clever puppetry is combined with a confident style to pull off a pleasing animal fable. This has the most frequent use of animals out of every piece this year; almost all of the characters are jungle-dwelling beasts.

Finally, a play that doesn't strictly belong with the pro-animal group, but has an honorary mention because its set includes a dog made solely from Coca-cola cans. Blackpool College's Me and My Friend has a set littered with these cans, but sadly devoid of actual animals references. Oh well. However, as if to compensate for the lack of animals, Me and My Friend picks up the earlier theme of mental instability established by Warwick and Edinburgh Universities.
The two characters here are out in the scary real world after their release from a psychiatric institute filled with fellow nutters.

So they're a bit like the students graduating from featured Universities/schools/colleges, really. Going out into the wider world of theatre, using their experiences in the madhouse of NSDF to further their careers and lives. Good luck to them all.