Punk Rock, presented by Deadset Theatre Company, dumps you into the centre of the high school mosh pit. Like Netflix’s Adolescence, with its single-shot scenes, this staging is all proximity. The audience wraps the action on all four sides. Performers pass within breathing distance. At times, they could step on your toes. The Mill’s black box becomes a pressure cooker.
The set is barely there. One long rectangular desk. A spatter of grey plastic chairs. A beige folder. That’s it. You’re like a temporary relief teacher, powerless to control the chaos. You can smell the hormones and hear the fluorescent lights humming in your head.
Simon Stephens wrote Punk Rock in 2009. It premiered in Manchester and transferred to the Lyric Hammersmith, where it made serious noise on the UK scene. The script is a chamber piece about sixth-formers circling a cliff. The endpoint is known. The free fall still shocks.
Megan Dansie directs with a firm hand and a clean pulse. Scenes snap to black, then punch back alive on a guitar burst from The White Stripes. The rhythm is propulsive. The room keeps resetting and your stomach never does. It’s an immersive, white-knuckle ride.
Casting is sharp. Zoe Battersby is enigmatic as Lily. You buy that boys lose their heads around her. She carries a private weather and invites storms. Sebastian Hollingsworth plays Nicholas as the floppy-haired rocker who thinks he understands women because he understands riffs. The chemistry between them crackles.
Charlie Butler is menacing as Bennett. The sneers land. So does the casual cruelty. In this intimate venue, it feels like you’re back in the lion’s den, trapped with the kid who enjoys ripping the wings off flies.
Amelia Baldock (Tanya) and Laura Lines (Cissy) are terrific at walking the thin line between accomplice and prey; we watch them decide when “enough” finally means enough.
James Pearce (William) and Archie Rowe (Chadwick) shoulder the hardest asks of the night: mental illness and neurodiversity, rendered without varnish.
Pearce’s William is the unreliable narrator in plain sight. A chameleon. The audience keeps trying to place him until it’s too late. Georgia Stockham and Brooke Hatton make the most of limited minutes.
Design choices favour nerve over decoration. That desk becomes a battleground, an altar and a lab bench. Fern Mines’ lighting keeps the library clinical, then fractures it at impact points.
Matilda Butler drives the blackout cues and sound hits with crisp timing; those crunchy guitar stings are small acts of violence. Tony Stankiewicz’s stage management is tight, which matters when bodies are this close. Angela Short coaches well with the accents, but at times, there are some inconsistencies.
The production asks the old Lord of the Flies question without preaching. Are we still animals? Do Bennett and William have the world pegged as a jungle with better stationery? Or does our love of culture, The White Stripes, trash cinema, gossip headlines, lift us beyond tooth and claw?
What about knowledge? Chadwick’s physics, the history riffs, the relentless info dumping about our place in the universe? Do these gifts free us, or make us seek modes of escape from reality, including delusion?
One of the night’s colder thoughts is that self-awareness doesn’t save you. It can sharpen the blade. Knowing your rank in the pecking order doesn’t make you kinder.
Deadset Theatre Company makes work for young people without sanding the edges off youth. It’s raw. It’s specific. It treats its audience like adults. Punk Rock‘s last image is a bruise that won’t fade fast. You shouldn’t want it to.
Punk Rock is presented by Deadset Theatre Company and runs to 12 October at The Mill, 154 Angas Street Adelaide SA 5000.
Tickets: https://deadsettheatre.com/shows-news/punk-rock
Website: https://deadsettheatre.com/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/deadsetcompany/
Photo credits: Paul Butler
