Focused and choreographed, the young performers highlight some of the ironies and contradictions in grown-up speech:

‘You speak a foreign language so we don’t understand.
You tell us to shut up.
We promise to be as good as gold.
You tell us it’s all going to be ok’.

The children play from a line facing the audience and follow trajectories that change according to the content of their speeches; sometimes addressing us in front of climbing frames, or from the top of a stack of chairs, other times left alone in the line, confrontational, direct and composed. Their delivery is rhythmical, in unison, and this creates a controlled environment in which individual and collective voices are clear.

When they refuse to speak into the microphone. When they carefully place their hands in their pockets. When they break into play. When they silently observe the audience, allowing for thought, emotion and reaction. Their words become a metaphor of the game of adulthood in this choreographed staging, where the lines on the floor of the gymnasium, as well as the shapes that the children form intersect and at times counteract. The children speak in a manner that would usually be beyond their means; we see them stand silent of their own accord, obey someone else’s rules, yet still maintain power and conviction. They work impressively well together, breathe together and manage to own a seventy-minute show.

Hierarchies of knowledge are removed in this performance and there is tension in the way the children stand, the things they say and the space they say them in. However, the relationship between text and physicality is not always explored to the fullest extent, and as much as the performance seeks for a balanced interrogation of language, it stops itself from going further by the limitations of its own controlled environment.

There is a noticeable power shift that occurs between the adults in the audience and the children performing onstage. This manifests itself through progression of text from the general to the specific, from humorous to confrontational, but also through the action onstage. At times, the audience is allowed to be part of the dialogue while at others it is faced with un-childlike youths, rigid, direct, and impersonal. The delineation between the two offers an infinite number of possibilities for the performance to probe its own structure. That was the challenge that Tim Etchells took on, and one that was met with a thought provoking, focused and complex performance.