Once and For All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen

Review: If you believe that teenagers should be seen and not heard then this is not the show for you. Once and For All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen - its very title a hormonal hissy fit - is a clamorous explosion of pubescence on the stage. It's joyful, silly, violent and funny. Belgian company Ontreorend Goed have harnessed something really vital in this one-hour show starring 13 teenagers.

Except for those highly articulate teens from American TV - designer-clad ciphers who seem to have been born talking sassy - dialogue is not the strong point of your average adolescent. Any theatre piece about "young people" runs the risk of making its audience cringe at every line. But Once and for All... largely dispenses with speech and focuses on what teenagers are good at: intense, unfettered emotion.

The ‘story' is laid out in the first five minutes. Thirteen mismatched chairs are lined up on the stage and soon they are filled with nine girls and four boys. Hijinks ensue. Two girls spit water at each other. Two boys flick rubber bands on each other's skin. A ‘bad' girl eyes up the boys with naked lust, and a nerdy one plays with her Barbie doll. The games intensify, there is skateboarding, roughhousing and tentative kissing, chairs fall over and things are getting seriously out of hand when a buzzer sounds and the young ones clear the stage and run off. (That's right - teenagers who clean up their mess. That's how you can tell it's only a show.)

Everything you need to know about the characters is there in this primal scene. But maybe you didn't catch much, because everything was happening at once. Don't worry: you're about to see it all again, several times, with variations both major and minor. Satirising society's desire to control authentic, natural urges, director Alexander Devriendt has his cast repeat their chaotic antics according to various arbitrary rules.

To say any more would be to spoil the fun. Rest assured, though, that when one cast member addresses the audience and says that she will "always go too far" because it's in the nature of teenagers to do so, that impulse is taken to its logical and Dionysian conclusion.

A lot of the energy on stage here is blatantly sexual, but this isn't a dirty show. Rather, it's one to make you relive the agonies and the ecstasies of teenagedom and ponder what you've lost. The emotions on display are raw and powerful and the cast of 14 to 18 year olds is riveting to watch. Like youth itself, however, this is a show with a shelf life: Devriendt has said that Once and For All... will cease next year before the kids get too old to perform the piece they helped devise. Buy a ticket now - before your chance at a second adolescence passes you by. Nick Dent

Preview: Ontroerend Goed is a Belgian company specialising in outlandish theatrical experiences. Their last visit to Sydney was in January when they presented The Smile off Your Face, a performance given to one blindfolded, wheelchair-bound audience member at a time. Now, in the continued spirit of on-stage outrage, they're touring a physical theatre piece with a cast of 13 wayward teenagers and an equally unwieldy title: Once and for All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen.

During the one-hour performance, the obstreperous teens laugh, cry, fight, dance, act stoned or drunk, kiss, and surf the highs and lows of the hormone tsunami. "These kids aren't performing, they're just being - and yet we watch, hypnotised by their vitality, their potential, their self-awareness, their secrets," wrote Brian Logan in his five-star review in The Guardian. The show has toured Europe, Canada and New Zealand and is playing at the Wharf Theatres this month as a Sydney Theatre Company add-on.

Artistic director Alexander Devriendt created the work out of a belief that adolescence is a vital time, and an under-explored theatrical subject. "People forget the importance of being a teenager," says Devriendt, on the phone from Montreal. "You want to become an adult so fast that you forget about that joyous age. It's also the only age that can make rebellion possible. Revolutions are started by teenagers."

Casting the show through personal contacts in Ghent (his 16-year-old brother, Edouard, is among the performers), Devriendt set up a Saturday rehearsal space and workshopped for three months. "I said, 'everything is possible here. Do the things you want to do that you can't do outside, that you're not allowed to do.' I only had one rule: you don't hurt anyone else, unless they want to be hurt."

Music plays an important part in the production, which has a soundtrack of songs of rebellion from different generations, such as Monster Magnet's 'Cyclops Revolution', Hole's 'Teenage Whore', Velvet Underground's 'I'm Waiting for the Man', and Peggy Lee's existentialist hit 'Is That All There Is?' "That's a pretty heavy song. It was a song from my grandparents' teenagedom. I use a lot of music, because when I was young, music was the only thing that understood me."

Touring a show with 13 teenagers comes with its own unique challenges. "Kids tend to play around and we have small accidents here and there, so we always have a replacement. We travel with 14 kids and five adults helping out. But it's not so different to touring with an older cast. I tend to look at the individual rather than the age. For instance, I have couple of 17 year olds that really shouldn't be allowed to do anything, and a couple of 13 year olds that are so responsible I would trust them with anything." Nick Dent

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