You Can See The Hills - Royal Exchange Studio - 25/09/08 by Julia Taylor

Most of us can remember the chaotic growth in, body, awareness and hormones that is adolescence. Matthew Dunster, the writer and director of ‘You can See the Hills’ at the Royal Exchange Studio Theatre until Saturday, October 11th remembers it so well that he has created Adam, a teenaged pupil in an Oldham comprehensive to describe what it is like.

Adam’s experiences of adolescent problems such as taunting a fellow pupil about his sexuality on the school bus, and wet dreams, are based on Matthew’s own recollections of being fourteen. His amusing and down-to-earth monologue featuring Will Ash as Adam, takes us into the boy’s soul.

Will talks to members of the audience as though they are his schoolfriends, confiding in them about girls who are fit, his first experience of sex, his mates, and the death of his granny. He stands by and watches whilst a girl is almost raped, yet he is basically a decent lad – and a very vain one.

“I am looking in the mirror and I really am quite beautiful”, he says. You can’t fault Will’s story telling. In return, he receives lots of laughs at the funny bits and worried silences at the serious parts.

It can’t have been easy for him. He was placed in front of a stark, white background with a bright, tortuous light beaming on either side.

It struck me that, perhaps pictures of his school chums could have been beamed on to that blank void. Nothing elaborate, just a few stills would have done. After all, the studio theatre was plastered with pictures of hills.

This delightfully scripted piece, if edited down, would make an ideal one hour radio programme. But two hours 10 minutes plus a twenty minute interval is, I believe, too long. Nevertheless, William Ash is a star who manages to hold the attention of his audience throughout his elongated piece.