Sydney Reviews

Production companies protest that preview performances are not review ready but Blinking Light, producers of These Youths Be Protesting, need not heed that point of view.

These Youths Be Protesting is public performance ready, having honed the show with four previews and now ready to present to a wider public audience.

These Youths Be Protesting are four disparate students from the same secondary school. Lemon, the founder and leader of the Sunlike Downs High School’s Recycling Club, which has a membership of two, is a political aspirant and school captain contender. She has called a meeting to rally membership and further her political ambition. Membership holder number two is Lemon acolyte, Georgie, a Lemon lackey, benignly bullied, seemingly happy to take lower status.

Orbiting the club is committed climate change campaigner and firebrand radical, Mandy, who sees through Lemon’s self serving political aspirations and marks her recycling club as flyweight in the face of a global crisis. The fourth and final youth, Jimbo, is in attendance by default as he is serving detention time for another in a series juvenile pranks.

The four do come together though when a local politician uses the club as a green-washing tactic in his campaign, a blind against an ecologically destructive development and they are forced to decide what truly matters.

Rachel Thomas as Georgie, conflicted activist with mining industry father, is an effervescent presence, eager to please, appease and applaud, who finally finds her own committed steel. Karrine Kanaan is just peachy as Lemon, self aggrandising political opportunist, blind to her own benign bullying, eventually awakened to the broader.

Mây Trần as Mandy, firebrand radical, is suitably searing as a vehement eco-warrior, while Hamish Alexander as Jimbo, perceived himbo, turns in an hilarious zero to hero portrayal, protector of the sandy sacred site of surfing, family barbies, and ancestral ashes scatterings.

Written and directed by Izabella Louk, These Youths Be Protesting piles on the portable polemic in an enthusiastic and entertaining production.