Review: Is My Microphone On?

I am always interested to see what the National Theatre Connections Festival selects as its play of choice each year, because so often their pick is refreshing, modern and relevant to a young ensemble of actors in today's changing world. They choose something affronting and significant which is really important, as it engages actors in a way that many other historical plays do not.

Is My Microphone On? is exactly this sort of play. It is a piece intended for an ensemble of youth ‘under the voting age’, whose aim is to hold the audience to account. It allows for a huge range of opportunities both in terms of staging and cast size.

The introduction of suggests an ensemble of ‘no fewer than seven’, but one of my GCSE groups have just chosen this for their scripted exam piece and they are only a four and it's working really well.

The reason for such flexibility is that there are no defined characters at all. When you open the text there are simply pages of lines and you can assign them, group them, move them as you see fit, which allows for a lot of creative interpretation.

The play is inspired by a line from Greta Thunberg's speech to British MP's at the Houses of Parliament on 23 April 2023 and is a provoking rally to young people to not accept the state of the world as they have inherited it, to challenge their elders as to why they have left them such environmental damage and to tell them ‘It's over, your world, your time is up… we're tired of your excuses’. The next generation is taking over.

There is a suggestion that it should be staged with microphones, which I really like the idea of, but also guitars and amps, akin to a sort of on-stage garage band. This I don't like. I don't see how the instruments fit in and have no idea where they could or should be played. It is only a suggestion, however, but it seems somewhat of a disconnect with the passion of the dialogue to be having some sort of cool house band in the background. Doing what?

Because the text is so open, it could be somewhat complicated to work out how you wanted to stage this play, but having directed last year's NT connections play Tuesday at my school with a cast of Year 7 and 8s, which is written in a similar format, I'm not one to shy away from a challenge.