The Boy from Centreville

“The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say”

Lifted from Edgar’s final speech in King Lear, these words begin The Boy from Centreville in an attempt to convey the objective of this production: to “give voice” to the victims of tragedy, and to hold up “a mirror to our times”.

Combining movement, media and voice, this theatrical montage is the creative response of The Central School of Speech and Drama to the shootings at Virginia Tech University in the spring of last year. Fusing documentary, psychological analyses and the words of witnesses, both stoic description and emotional perception are woven into the script. The visual projections which preface and accompany the performance are beautiful and provoking, creating layers of metaphor and suggestion to develop what is said by students, teachers, journalists, and counsellors.

But with such a patchwork of activity on stage, it is often difficult to extract meaning from the flurried assortment of scenes. It is particularly difficult to decipher what much of the choreographed movement is intended to represent. With such disjointedness, The Boy from Centreville is largely devoid of tragic momentum and visceral impact. Though the desire to let the voiceless be heard is commendable, this piece lacks the courage to let pain speak louder than reason. The voices of bitterness, anger and confusion too often become lost amidst elaborate embellishments at the hands of the artist.