Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Aug 17-28
I imagine it went something like this ...
One day a man woke up and said “I want to do a play. I want to do a play, and it will be about teenagers and performed entirely by teenagers. It could only be performed by teenagers. It will be unapologetic, chaotic, and unpredictable”.
Alexander Devriendt – artistic director of Belgian theatre entrepreneurs Ontroerend Goed – found thirteen Flemish teenagers and put together a show which became aptly known as: Once and For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen. Devriendt (33) and his motley crew of adolescents brought the show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2008 where it received critical acclaim and earned a tour to festivals all over the world. Critics especially applauded the show’s gleaming nostalgia, and its artful artifice of a universal ‘teenagedom’ realised as a realm now lost to today’s adults. Devriendt became something of champion of unheard teenagers, a Peter Pan to the Lost Boys if you will. Nestling tour dates around school holidays, Once and For All…was on the road for two years before its final performance in Ghent in April of this year. The Lost Boys had to grow up eventually, but seemingly Pan didn’t …
