Punk Rock, Lyric Hammersmith

Harper Regan was one of the best plays I saw in 2008, and its writer, Simon Stephens, is one of the hottest theatre properties going. (He also seems to be a particularly fine and friendly man.) But Punk Rock, which I saw at the Lyric last night, isn’t his most resonant work. In fact, it doesn’t resonate much at all.

It’s set in a public school in Stephens’ native Stockport. Stephens used to be a teacher, so one might expect the play to derive from personal experience. But one of its major flaws, to this viewer at least, is that it lacks credibility. The criticism often applied to Alan Bennett’s History Boys (although less appropriately, because that play barely even pretended to be realistic) applies here too: these teenagers are preternaturally articulate, and masters of a degree of emotional self-awareness (not total, but considerable) that didn’t characterise my adolescence, nor that of anyone else I know.

Of course, Stephens’ portrait of youth, and privilege, is in other places acutely observed. And with the artful bluntness of his writing, he engineers some heart-in-mouth moments. But they’re often phoney – as when, having asked out new girl Lilly (Jessica Raine), and been spurned, geeky William (Tom Sturridge) admits how exposed he now feels. “I’ve never done that before,” he says. “It didn’t go well.” A lovely, startlingly vulnerable moment. But not one that’s convincing – at least, not in the context of a play where too many characters are too self-aware, too much of the time.

It’s a play that depends for its effects on some fairly tired dramatic conventions – as when bullied pupil Chadwick Mead steps downstage centre to deliver a monologue on the coming apocalypse. We’re not listening to a real schoolkid speak here; we’re listening to a speech written by a playwright, to which the other characters onstage pay dutiful if uncharacteristic attention. Elsewhere, there are wide credibility gaps. Why does everyone defer to the bully Bennett (Henry Lloyd Hughes)? He seems a pushover to me. And why is it only Chadwick who makes a run for it when William starts waving a gun around?

Which brings us to the dramatic denouement, when a meandering play about posh kids’ schooldays becomes something darker and more topical. But one’s understanding of the psychology of Columbine-style shootings isn’t added to by Punk Rock. On the contrary, its anti-hero (and by implication, Stephens) explicitly denies us an explanation for the crime. I was left nonplussed, and I left the theatre empty-handed, as it were – passably entertained, but with no new insights into adolescence or violence.