In early October I was foolishly thinking that I would avoid reading any further novels until I'd finished both Connections 2013 and Connections 2012, the two volumes of plays 'for Young People' from the National Theatre that have been sitting on my bookshelves since last year. Well, that wasn't to be. It's true that I have just finished reading the 10 plays from the 2013 volume and technically speaking haven't read a novel in that time, but that's because short stories don't count, and I haven't got all that far in the novel that I couldn't help but make a start on so it's hardly 'read' at all.
I think I saw myself racing through the plays on my reading list back then but that hasn't been the case, much as I've enjoyed the 5 I've read since. In fact, taking the plays slowly is a way of maintaining their individual integrity. Each offers its own world and I find I have to work hard to gain entrance since these worlds bear so little resemblance to my own in their concerns - and even in their language. I don't think I talked like the teens depicted when I was a kid. The dialogue is generally a lot livelier than I remember conversations being, and a good deal more sweary, I think. Not that myself and those I knocked around with were clean-spoken in any sense, but I don't think we cursed at quite the level of intensity maintained in most of these pieces.
I'm not complaining though. The final drama in Connections 2013, entitled Forty-Five Minutes featured a lot of the kind of raw dialogue I couldn't put on a school stage, but it struck me as an outstanding piece of work, angry, funny and honest, with lots of insights into the pressures faced by the young people depicted (who are completing their UCAS applications in the titular time allowed.) I'm looking forward to Connections 2012, but I'll be taking it slowly - and reading much else besides, I hope.
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