Review by Katrina Couzens of TWENTEE presented by Scrapped Collective
TWENTEE has the perfect premise for a psychological thriller: a young Tee, feeling isolated and lonely as she transitions from the structure of high school to the chaos of young adulthood, reaches out to her scattered friendship group for her birthday, only to have her invitations hijacked by a swish, devilish MTV producer Francis, wanting to create a reality TV drama and save his dying brand.
The lighting and sound design were on point, building a dramatic, chaotic mood, and snapping the audience between reality and Tee’s increasingly deluded brainscape. Tee and Francis’ performances were magnetic. The pair had fantastic stage presence and chemistry. The set was also perfect, and Tee moved so naturally around the substation-turned-bedroom that you could convince me that she’d been living there for a few weeks.
The pacing of the script, however, was too messy for the thriller genre. A plodding second act—Tee’s refusal of the call to MTV-fame—scuppers the tension built in the first. Quicker buy-in would have given the script more time to develop the meatier themes of the story: isolation, relationship drift, ego, delusion, and paranoia. It would have also given more time to develop the characters of Tee’s friends.
Tee’s friends should have been the backbone of TWENTEE, a grounded backdrop from which to compare Tee’s journey as her deal with the devil warps her view of them and takes her further and further from what she truly needs. Instead, they came across as caricatures from the get go, making Tee’s final outburst feel like just a continuation of their bickering rather than the climax of a tragedy.
TWENTEE was ambitious, well-produced, and entertaining. Using the Woolloongabba Substation also tickled my desire for the Anywhere Festival to take me places I wouldn’t normally go. I think with a bit of extra work on the script, this show could be amazing.
