Hands up anyone who never suffered or witnessed bullying at school. If your hand is up, you are in a minority because one in four Australian students are bullied and there are usually bystanders.
In response to reports of suicides and suicide attempts resulting from bullying, Australia has a national bullying prevention program: Bullying. No Way! Hundreds of schools around the country are participating in the program and building cultures that don’t tolerate bullying, many documenting great success.
Boys at the Back of the Bus, a new play by Gympie’s Perseverance Street Theatre Company, shows there is still a long way to go in addressing violence perpetrated by children on other children.
The boys at the back of the bus PHOTO: supplied
Written by playwright Sofia Abbey, the play gives the audience a fourth wall into the brutal, uncensored turf war fought ‘on the worst place on earth: the school bus’ between four Grade 9 bullies and the rest of the students from various grades.
The Grade 9 boys at the back of the bus, played by Lachlan Stevens, Noah Colless-Skuce, Eden Levy and Riley Hotham, are convincingly menacing and sadistic as they stomp on to the stage like angry animals ready to tear limbs off the others. In a powerful fight scene, one bully seems to metamorphosize into an ape.
‘This bus reeks of virgin’ says one of the boys as he boards the bus before miming masturbation and other sex acts. The bullies use cruel names for the other students who mostly submit to the abuse apart from one alpha girl brave enough to challenge them.
The physical and emotional violence depicted in this play is shocking and probably an accurate reflection of day-to-day life in some schools. I understand some of the script is loosely based on real events. Adults are sometimes complicit, in active and passive ways.
The audience was flinching throughout this performance. The light relief of a love story developing between the last two students left when everyone got off the bus was a welcome break. They court each other charmingly, displaying the creativity that flourishes when there is peace.
Cleverly, the play avoids the simple binary of: ‘bullies bad, everyone else good,’ by also depicting the more subtle manipulation, coercive behaviour, exclusion and belittling occurring between every other student on the bus. The way class, status and gender are used to gain social status is handled realistically with one student telling another ‘my parents are professional athletes’ while another student with no filter tells her bestie: ‘Your parents are farmers’ and it does not sound like a good thing.
Grade 12 student, Angelo, played by Seth White (left) cops it from the alpha boys and his alpha female cousin Lola, played by Rayner Thomas. PHOTO: supplied
Naïve, home-schooled Ocean (a male character played by a female actor Maya Moss) is woefully out of his league with the teenage terrorists on the school bus. Ocean’s confrontations with the boys at the back of the bus are compelling because the audience knows he is on dangerous ground. He tries to negotiate a peaceful solution with violent boys who have zero interest in peace. Ocean’s efforts do not end well… until they do, but you’ll have to see the play to find out how.
Home-schooled Ocean (left) is naive about the ways of the world. PHOTO: supplied
The entire cast deliver strong performances: a reflection of their talent and commitment and of good direction from Fletcher Colfs and Jonas White.
Skilled direction can be hard to detect but you can see it in the way the actors cohere as a group to deliver convincing scenes. It’s one thing to deliver a good solo performance but a truly strong ensemble has actors playing off each other with natural timing. The united performance, lack of errors or missed cues and the smooth, assured movement of the cast in this show make it easy to forget these confronting scenes aren’t really happening.
Besties Eve and Amina, played by Arwen White (left) and Nixon Keable have their own power dynamics going on undernearth all the ‘love yous’ they throw around. PHOTO: supplied
The language is gritty and a wake-up call about how some high school students speak to each other. The play is loaded with killer lines:
‘The Grade 9 girls are too busy ruining themselves to ruin anyone else.’
‘There’s no such thing as friends: just parasites.’
‘His alter (personality) is a dog.’
I went to high school on the Gold Coast in the ‘80s and if you’ve watched Puberty Blues you’ll know the bullying, chauvinism and coercive behaviour were pretty bad back then.
Boys at the Back of the Bus shows school bullying has now gone to a whole new level.
Students at my school used to say ‘rack off’ or in extreme cases, ‘piss off’ during conflict. In this play, the kids say: ‘kill yourself’.
Bullying in the 2020s is monumentally amplified by social media and one bully in this play is filming and uploading videos of every one of their acts of cruelty and humiliation. The boys are depicted as 100 per cent motivated by malice (though research shows an insecure desire for social status is really the motivation).
My only criticism of this production would be that voice volume was sometimes overused as a tool for expression. There are ways to convey emotion such as facial expression, pausing and gestures, other than raising your voice and there was more shrieking than was perhaps necessary. Light and shade go a long way.
The set, lighting and sound design were simple and effective. Overall, Boys at the Back of the Bus delivers the calibre of dramatic storytelling about contemporary themes, relevant to Gympie and any high school in Australia with powerful performances we’ve come to expect from Perseverance Street Theatre Company.
Boys at the Back of the Bus contains strong language and adult themes and is suitable for audiences 15 years and over. It runs at the Perseverance Street studio in Barter St, Gympie, until Sun 13 July.
