For the past eight years, Markwell Presents – Brad Jennings and Steven Maxwell – have been creating Cinematic Theatre: “an exciting fusion of live stage performance and the magic of the big screen”. Advanced Screening 2010 is a new work for young people that, "takes the best of both theatre and cinema to create an exciting, relevant and inspiring experience”.

But exactly what is the best of theatre and cinema?

What makes theatre and cinema unique are inherently oppositional qualities. Theatre is live, three dimensional, ephemeral, and unpredictable. Cinema is not. Some films, and especially television, have become more theatrical – Glee, Deadwood, The Sopranos and True Blood are all popular examples – but regardless of this, or the advances in 3-D technology there is nothing like the live interaction between actor and audience.

Much contemporary theatre also incorporates technology into its performance – using multimedia, mobile phones, vodcasting, podcasting, twittering, social networking, and the internet – to remain relevant (and sometimes, ironically, more ‘live’), especially to younger audiences. I think the best of such work uses technology as a seamless and integral part of the overall performance text. Dramaturgically, the technology has to be as relevant to the text as the dialogue, lighting, sound, and so on; otherwise it is superfluous. Film works to draw us into the fictional world; theatre reaches out to engage us, so the two forms have to be strongly integrated to enhance the best of both forms.

There is no doubting the skill of the cinematic features of Advanced Screening 2010. Andrew Martin’s CG graphics are visually impressive as the backdrop of an animated high school setting. The animation sweeps to different parts of the school for each new scene and we are presented with symbolic graphic portraits of the main characters as they are introduced. However, I didn’t feel that the cinematic elements were ever really more than just a backdrop. I found myself more engaged by the young performers, who were very effective at creating the world of the play with nothing more than a few benches on a bare stage. The young audience I sat with also seemed most engaged by the performers and the dialogue; the animation seemed almost incidental to them. Or does this possibly have more to do with over familiarity with the form? Perhaps young people simply accept moving images as a constant backdrop to their lives without questioning their necessity?

Where Advanced Screening 2010 succeeded most was in its refusal to patronise either the young performers or the text. Selected through an audition process from over 150 high school students, the young cast were given professional training and experience through the development, rehearsal and production process. Respect was obviously both shown to and expected of the cast, who were uniformly good. It was a pleasure to watch a strong ensemble performance of engaging and committed performers who were clearly enjoying themselves and sharing that enjoyment with us.

The script largely succeeds in taking young people’s relationships seriously without being earnest. In the opening speech, the audience is confronted by William (Myles McGuire), who argues that, “Young love is often trivialised by adults, but surely our emotions are just as valid as theirs.” The audience clearly enjoyed emotionally truthful lines like, “I swear I’ll break his balls if he ever cheats on me” and “He dumped me. By text”. However, it occasionally slipped into adult reflection rather than adolescent experience. I’m not sure how many 17 year olds actually say, “Let’s grab some fun with our friends”, and the audience squirmed uncomfortably during an oddly twee musical interlude of contemporary folk music that I think was intended to be sentimentally charming but seemed more suited to the Captain and Tennille than two twenty-first century teenagers.

The script worked best when it wasn’t coy about the realities of adolescent behaviour – sex and drinking – yet cleverly avoided profanities or explicitness. A scene in which one character regrets losing her virginity to a shallow Lothario was particularly effective. The plot addressed the issues confronting different couples (unrequited love, new love, lost love etc), and occasional references to Romeo and Juliet made me wonder how the script could have developed more thematic layers around the idea of young lovers?

For example, at one point one of the girls says, “You boys are all the same”, and one young man sarcastically tells his friend, “It’s really amazing how much you know about women”. As adults, we are all aware of how gender differences can complicate relationships and while these differences might not seem to change much, they are perhaps intensified as adolescents when we are less likely to know how to cope with or understand them. While the individual stories in Advanced Screening 2010 were engaging, thematic focus on these bigger questions might have helped to tie the work together even more effectively.

Overall, this was an impressively professional production and clearly a significant experience for a young cast. Markwell Presents are to be congratulated for providing young performers and audiences with such relatable, mature stories. While the elements of cinematic theatre might not always work seamlessly, they remain admirably ambitious in their desire to make theatre alive and exciting for young audiences.

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