It’s been over a year since I was part of the West Yorkshire Playhouse Youth Theatre, and it’s great to be invited back to see what they’ve been up to. Their latest offering is Immune, a new play co-commissioned by Royal and Derngate Northampton and Plymouth Theatre Royal. Written by Oladipo Agboluaje, directed by Gemma Woffinden and designed by Emma Williams, I looked forward to descending into the Courtyard Theatre.

Immune revolves around a large group of teenagers who are in the midst of preparing for their school’s arts festival. They’re given the responsibility of organising the festival, which ignites their desires for proving each of their abilities to lead, but also creates tension amongst them. In a particularly heated chemistry class, the tension and trivialities of school life lead to the knocking over of a glass containing a chemical they’ve been studying. The glass explodes and the chemical is released into the air, and can’t escape due to all of the windows being shut.

The students brush the incident off as a normal day-to-day happening at the school, and continue on to their rehearsal afterwards. But soon after their rehearsal ends, they discover something sinister; their teachers and peers who weren’t in the chemistry class are dead, and soon discover that their parents are too. They step outside of the school gates to face the cold world that has replaced their old one, and it isn’t long before they uncover something even more sinister that will change their world as they know it, although they won’t necessarily ever get to see it.

The Youth Theatre really brings the world of the play alive; they have loads of energy that they inject into every scene. While this energy may sometimes result in the tripping over and inaudibility of lines, it helps to construct the world that the characters inhabit. They present a variety of different characters, many of which are drawn from the plane of teenage archetypes, which allows us to further visualise the play-world.

One thing that jars with me in this production, however, lies within the way it’s written. There is a strange mixture of naturalistic acting and elements of Brecht’s Epic Theatre; performers will be acting out a scene and carrying the narrative, and suddenly, performers will announce what their characters are doing whilst they do it, and occasionally how they feel about something. This was originally intended to distance an audience from the characters and world of a play, allowing them to analyse the moral situations set out by a text and the performers. In this production, however, it seems to distance the audience from the real emotional depth of the characters. Rather than show us how they feel, the performers tell us, which made it difficult for me to emotionally invest in the characters, along with their desires, hopes and dreams – which form the undercurrent of Agboluaje’s text.

This isn’t present in just this production, however; I’ve seen it in several plays for young people. Most notably, I saw it two years ago in the Youth Theatre’s production of Evan Placey’s Girls Like That, as well as its successor Pronoun a year later. It seems to be a style of writing that, in my opinion, needs a bit of an overhaul, so we can properly give way to the characters young people are portraying and really hear their stories.

In spite of this, I really enjoyed Immune. It has a great scenography, aided by an uncluttered set and simple lighting and sound design, and represents the West Yorkshire Playhouse Youth Theatre’s passion for telling stories.

Immune was at the West Yorkshire Playhouse until 25 July. For more information, visit the West Yorkshire Playhouse website. Photo by West Yorkshire Playhouse.