One of the ten plays commissioned for this year’s NT Connections, Shout is a play about difference that centres on a girl who has selective mutism: she is physically capable of speech but a social anxiety disorder prevents her from doing so.
Dana Alford (Lola Faith) is a very bright girl, an A student good with words even though she can’t voice them. She can handle exams, but when it comes to interviews to gain acceptance at university, how can she handle them?
Of course there are students who bully her as an oddity, and she’s not a lone victim. There’s seems to be a class of youngsters with different conditions—the "freaks" and "geeks" as the cast list calls them—and it is suggested they handle the bullies by thinking of themselves as different in a way that is special. That’s not a bad idea, but not one that will solve her problem; however, she has an admirer. He is a sportsman who hopes that his prowess on the football field will gain him that university place. He wants her help with his English, and he fancies her.
Though he gets her to communicate by text, she wants to be just friends, and it is through another lad, who shares her slightly dated taste in music and who gets them both listening to the same track on headphones, that a breakthrough happens. With no voices except the one in her ears, she regains her own voice and finds herself singing. Then, when it comes to students presenting personal statements describing themselves and what they want of life, she finds her own voice in the other sense too and leads the class in make her presentation first.
Though actress and dramatist Alexis Zegerman is British, the school in this play sometimes feels more like an American college than a British one: they have a graduation day complete with gowns and mortarboards and there is a bevy of prissy young ladies in pink who seem very transatlantic, but this is a cast that delivers a show packed with energy in their own accent. The teaching staff are deliberately caricatured, and the waving of furniture in the air that marks scene changes feels like a send up of the current fashion for choreographing resets.
We never discover what trauma led to Dana’s condition and, though these performers are engaging and funny, Shout comes across less of a literal story and more as a strong metaphor for discovering who you are and being confident with your own voice. After all, that is what growing up is about.