See Thru Sam: Truncated manuscript, fragments 1 -9

...most of all, The Incredible Adventures of See Thru Sam makes me feel old. It's in the quiet moments, perhaps not necessarily connected to Sam's melodramatic fantasy world, when he acts like an innocent teenager, trying to articulate the feelings of falling for the girl, or the fear of the bully. Emotions that I recognise but can never feel again, lost in maturity and experience.

The audience is predominantly made up of school pupils, arrayed in rows with a teacher at each end. They enjoy the bursts of naughty language and chuckle at the adults acting children. Sam's nemesis, his uncle Herbie, is played for laughs: the confrontations between the grieving Sam and his foster parent are presented both in real time and in silhouette, through Kim Beveridge's digital design, as a battle between comic book characters....

McKnight's script reveals his experience in pantomime: Sam's side-kick, Walrus, mugs gamely for all the world like a teenage Buttons...

... when the animation shows a scene - Violet's bedroom, the street outside Sam's school - the script has a bad habit of describing what is up there on the screen... less show or tell than show and tell...

...a version of the tragic structure described by Jean Anouilh, the inevitable conclusion clear from almost the very beginning...


...back to the problem of "the critical voice": my experience precludes me making a strong assessment of See Through Sam because it is not aimed at me...

Sam's perky good humour is gradually replaced by a more sinister alienation: whether this is a function of his grieving or some kind of personality disorder - the obsession with the colour green, initially part of his memory about his parents' death, is revealed as an earlier, inexplicable anxiety - is never quite clear...

... yet another twist in Random Accomplice's decade long journey through theatre: a play aimed more at teenagers... if Small Town was an adult bawdy romp, See Thru Sam transposes the broad humour into a tragedy...

...obvious research into superheroes, using the nuances of the Superman mythos to define the boundaries of Sam's experience. Indeed, Superman is a motif throughout, and Sam's geeky knowledge provides him with a few clues that help him understand his own experience...