Dylan Coburn Gray writes for Culture about Ask Too Much of Me, his new play for the National Youth Theatre, which runs at The Abbey Theatre from 19 - 24 August 2019.
My NYT play was The Seagull. I played a schoolteacher who becomes more charmless the more he tries to charm, related a little too hard, found the process a joy, ended up working in theatre as a writer myself. (Happily I'm a lot happier than Konstantin.) I still love that play, even as I've gotten more and more impatient with the rote veneration we're expected to offer Chekhov. He was a #genius! He offers glimpses of the #universalhumancondition! I don't really believe in a universal human condition.
Teenagers are the limit case of what we're all going through. They've inherited a situation they can't do much about. They do their best despite the suspicion it's not enough.
I think Chekhov's plays' power is specificity, not universality, that his characters are like contemporary adolescents, that they echo a shared time in each of our lives before we diverge. Monied, bored, thwarted, dissipated because the frictionless existence their money affords them is the one obstacle their money can't remove; there's not much for Chekhov's mopes to do but feel feelings all day, complexly and at great length. They make great protagonists for that reason. And so do teenagers, once you take their feelings seriously, which doesn't mean without humour.
Ask Too Much of Me is set in the run-up to the 2018 referendum. It grapples with the complexities, which doesn't mean pretending obvious bad faith arguments and lies aren't. A lot of it happens in a squat. It's about living your politics, or trying to, or inevitably falling ironically short. (It depends on your perspective.) Squats pose interesting questions, like all domestic situations, but because they're outside our typical structures they do so more urgently: Is opting out of a dysfunctional society's excesses a luxury few can afford? What do we owe each other? What do we do when my needs are in direct conflict with yours? Why does Rachel always leave her plates in the sink and how can we make her stop?
In the play, a 16-year-old tells the audience that between equal rights force decides. Teenagers know this, even if they haven't read Marx, because they have adult intelligence without adult autonomy. They are intimately familiar with the fact that reason is powerless in the face of power, that power is reasonable only when it gets sick of just pleasing itself and wants people to praise it for pleasing itself. Doesn't matter if he promised, Dad's only giving you a lift into town if he's in the mood. Doesn't matter how many people freeze to death in tents, Eoghan Murphy has huffed so much market-forces-fix-everything hoop that he will never do anything to make Dublin any less of an obscenity. Argument doesn't work on power; it doesn't listen because it doesn't care because it doesn't have to.
Teenagers are the limit case of what we're all going through. They've inherited a situation they can't do much about. They do their best despite the suspicion it's not enough. They're resilient until they're brittle. They get sick of feeling sick and tired and guilty and manage to be joyful. (Sometimes.) So that's what our play shows.
Ask Too Much of Me is at The Abbey Theatre from 19 - 24 August 2019 - find out more here.
