Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Ruby Bains, Natalie Barton, Leonardo Bertamini, Ellen Boyland, Erin Clarke, Kathleen Collins, Alice Corrigan, Callum Crighton, Stuie Dagnall, Sophie Edmunds, Joseph Edwards, Spike Fairclough, Will Flush, Neve Frost, Leah Gould, Tilly Harrison, Jasmine Hayes, Jake Holmes, Emily Horrex, Poppy Hughes, Chloe Hughes, Hannah Jennings, Kieran Kidd, Emily Lloyd, Luke Logan, Georgie Lomax-Ford, Frank McGuire, Charlotte Manuel, Aimee Marnell, Niamh McCarthy, Lizzy Meadows, Kaylee-Anne Meredith, Jack Malloy, Ciara Moriarty, Azarias Morris, Chloe Nall-Smith, Rachel Newnham, Courtney Parry, Luke Patterson, Jamie Pye, Keeley Ray, Marry Roberts, Nathan Russell, Samuel Serrano Roberts, Kalia Sharples, Sakura Singh Corke, Mica Skeete, Katie Smith, John Stephenson, Ellie Turner, Laura Tyrer, Natalie Vaughan, Campbell Wallace, Owen Walsh, Tommy Williams, Matthew Woodhouse.
It seems like the voice of the youth has never been so vocal, so barbed with their ideas, so honest with the opinion, so right with many aspects of society today; the so called Baby Boomer generation could be forgiven for just making the most of being alive at a time of relative peace, that the only thing they wanted to do was live for a good time, for Generation X, the in-built nihilism and distrust against authority made them ripe to be the ones that the flack of anger of today was the perfect sounding board in which to rage against.
It is said that every generation wages war with the one before and makes friends with its grand-parents, if that is the case then YEP’s latest production, The City and the Value of Things is a masterpiece of observation that has been allowed to grow into a sea of points of everything that is wrong, that we as a society have allowed to become so normal that it when disaster strikes, when a tower burns and people are killed by lies, greed and incompetence, when a person can just simply purchase a gun as easily as a loaf of bread, when a politician can decide at the stroke of a pen who is sick, when a homeless person freezes to death on the streets of Britain, when the word economy becomes a living, breathing entity in which to beat like a stick across the back sides of all who live in this modern version of a Dickens’ parody we call existence; then you know we have lost sight of the value of everything despite knowing its marked-up price.
It takes the innocence of youth in which to remind an audience that we as a society have failed those coming up behind us, yes not everything created by those who have lived since the Second World War has been coated in rust, music created by the labelled Generation X is arguably the one that still today rocks the hardest, but it is to the things that make society good and decent in which the feet of clay have become the most talked of and most venerated part of the statue in our midst.
YEP always seem to know just how to hammer home the point, and with this incredibly large ensemble, and directed by the huge talent of Chris Tomlinson and Matt Rutter, The City and the Value of Things is a passionate tale of episodes, punctuated by the greed inherent when visualised as a game of luck thrown dice and with the fantastic attributes that have become part of the very fabric of YEP; a brutal but wonderfully barbed anger that we really should be afraid of seeing spilling out further, it would be better to heed the words of the youth, for they at least are the ones to whom have to try and fix the problems we created.
Ian D. Hall