A few weeks back our senior school were treated to a performance “Innit” by Colette Forde. A fantastic one woman show on the world of teenage mental health.
DC Metro Review : Innit, a one-woman show written by and starring Forde, is a fervid first-person monologue that examines the life and mind of an Irish-born high-school girl growing up in Manchester, England, in the 1990s. Though the underprivileged character’s local slang and heavy working-class accent are often difficult for an American audience to understand (e.g., “innit” = “isn’t it”), her intonations, facial expressions, gestures, and body language speak volumes and clearly underscore everything she is saying, thinking, and feeling. Wearing a disheveled school uniform on her first visit to the “psychiologist,” the outspoken, foul-mouthed, and heart-rending fifteen-year-old opens up with disturbing disclosures about her classmates, her dysfunctional parents, and the abuse she has endured from them; her plans to improve her looks and her hopeful aspirations to become a singer and dancer (interspersed segments of music videos and silhouetted dancing lighten the mood, but lengthen the awkward transitions between scenes); her memories of the few caring people who treated her with kindness; and her unwitting revelations of all the pain, loneliness, desperation, and insecurities buried beneath her brazen exterior and her devastating sense of being ugly, unwanted, and not good enough. While Forde’s adult face belies her credibility as a youth, and the show’s ending comes with unexpected suddenness, her performance is a tour-de-force of teenage angst.
