teenage
Owen Richards
It sometimes feels like an age between Stranger Things seasons. Blame Netflix. The binge-watching trend that it helped solidify means that most people consume all eight hours of content in a single weekend. It comes and goes in a flash. But don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s a disposable snack, the TV equivalent of those famous Eggo pancakes. Stranger Things 3 is blockbuster television, full of the laughs, jumps and exaggerated nostalgia that made it such a hit in 2016.After a mixed-bag second season, creators The Duffer Brothers have returned to their winning formula. Gone are the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time hasn't necessarily been kind to this slow-aborning West End transfer of a show first seen (and lauded) in its 2015 debut in Leicester and then again two years later for a summer run at the Menier Chocolate Factory. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 has now reached the West End, and the obvious question is who is this musical version of the ever-popular Sue Townsend books for? It's difficult to imagine overly many of the Adrian Moles of today (or even their parents) latching on to jokes about Dallas or Elizabeth Taylor, and the retrograde sexual politics – "shut your Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s no rest for the webbed wonder in Spiderman: Far from Home. It’s just a few months since Marvel wiped out Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame and his protégé Peter Parker is being hounded to fill Tony Stark’s place. Iron Man didn’t give the teenager his high-tech Spidey suit just for him to stuff it in the back of the wardrobe and get on with being a normal teenager, not when the planet is in danger (again). Tom Holland, so endearing in 2017’s Spiderman: Homecoming, is a little overwhelmed by the responsibilities thrust upon him. The young British actor is adept at Read more ...
Saskia Baron
I’m sure there’s an anthropologist out there writing a thesis on American teenagers’ coming-of-age rituals as performed in movies, from American Graffiti to this year’s Booksmart. Such a study would be rich with observations about how the genre has evolved from 1973, when the leads were white, male and straight, through to 2019 when one of the leading ladies is a lesbian and the other one has a crush on a mixed-race heart-throb. Somewhere in between those two extremes falls Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, made in 1992 (but set in 1976). There’s only one black Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The release of Booksmart is perfectly scheduled for half term, this high school buddy comedy is guaranteed to tempt youngsters away from their exam revision. It’s fast and funny and packed with squirm-inducing sex gags and a peppy soundtrack. Its heroes are Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and her best friend Amy (Kaitlyn Deaver), the class swots who forswore all extra-curricular fun in order to study hard and get into top universities. They are the teens who got fake ID not to go drinking underage but to use the 24-hour library. Molly corrects the punctuation on the graffiti in the toilets Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Flight is a show by experimental Scottish theatre company Vox Motus, adapted from the novel Hinterland by Caroline Brothers. It’s about two Afghan child refugees making their way across Europe to the fabled land of “London” and is based very directly on her own interviews with asylum seekers as a journalist. So far, so narrartively straightforward but Flight is unlike anything most people will have seen. It is as much art installation as it is theatre, perhaps more so, yet it’s a tale beautifully, economically told and is profoundly moving.In a recent artsdesk interview Candice Edmunds, one Read more ...
Owen Richards
Where would you go for a devastating study on the human condition? The home movies of teenage skaters would be very low down on that list. But most of those movies aren’t filmed, compiled and analysed by Bing Liu, the director of Minding the Gap. Perfectly balancing perspective and curiosity, it’s perhaps the most unexpected achievement on the year.Liu has apparently always been the one behind the camera. From his early teens, he’s been pointing the lens towards his friends, primarily Zack and Keire. They’re both friends we recognise: Zack is the joker, always up for partying hard, and Keire Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You might think an American high school comedy an unlikely place to locate a love letter to Oscar Wilde – even if there’s a flamboyantly gay story behind it. But Freak Show screenwriters Beth Rigazio and Patrick J Clifton, adapting James St James’ source story, have a way with wit that is clearly aiming to match the writer whom they keep quoting. The fact that they sometimes try rather too hard doesn’t detract from the full-on experience that is producer Trudie Styler’s 2017 directorial debut, a film that sustains itself on the sheer over-the-top camp energy of its teenage hero, Billy Bloom, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
We've all been there. The disappointing fling. The gently shattered illusions. The abortive holiday eliding languor and boredom. Teenage ennui. Revels peopled by runaways. Talking animals. Talking animals? Well, fine. Not quite.Sea Monsters is Chloe Aridjis’s third novel. It is the story of seventeen year old Luisa’s escape to the Oaxaca coast. She’s a clever girl with foreign university on the horizon and a vague sense that there’s more to life than the cycle of exams and gay goth nightclubs that characterise her existence in Mexico City.With the object of her romantic affections — Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Here's a good pub quiz question: after Shakespeare, who was the most performed playwright in America last year? Arthur Miller? Tennessee Williams? David Mamet? None of those. It was Lauren Gunderson, and here is the UK premiere of her intimate two-hander Young Adult play, I and You, which is directed by Edward Hall and has two striking stage debuts.We are in a teenage bedroom – messy, with lots of pinks, fairy lights and glitter. There's a slightly claustrophobic air about it which makes sense when we learn that its occupant, Caroline (Maisie Williams, Arya Stark in Game of Thrones), is all Read more ...
Alfred Quantrill
Design/Play/Disrupt at the V&A covers a wide variety of games that are spearheading the gaming world at the moment. It takes a closer look at eight of the most innovative and different games that have changed the world of gaming in the last five years. Concept sketches and art show the games developing as they gradually take their final form. The exhibition also looks at how videogames could be more life-like and give a new perspective on the world.Some of the games cover topics never really seen before in games. Mafia 3 is set in 1968 USA, and addresses racism as an integral part of the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This London premiere of Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s 2010 musical (based on Daniel Waters’ oh-so-Eighties cult classic movie, starring Christian Slater and Winona Ryder) had a development period at The Other Palace – no critics allowed – before cruising into the West End with a cult following already in place. A winning strategy, as it turns out, resulting in adoring audiences cheering on a show that’s largely worthy of their adulation.Veronica (Carrie Hope Fletcher, pictured below with Jamie Muscato) decides to strategically befriend it girls the Heathers (Sophie Isaacs and T’ Read more ...