Theatre Review: Morning (Lyric Hammersmith)

All told, 2012 has been a pretty good year to be Simon Stephens. The prolific playwright’s version of A Doll’s House at the Young Vic was well received this summer, and his National Theatre adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ecstatically so, while earlier this year Three Kingdoms, Stephens’s play on the subject of European sex-trafficking, caused a stir when it debuted at the Lyric Hammersmith. Not a chap to rest for long upon his laurels, the industrious Stephens now returns to the Lyric with his latest work, Morning, an hour-long play that was one of the hot tickets on the Edinburgh Fringe last month. Subtitled “a play for young people,” Morning was devised through workshops involving actors from both Junges Theater Basel and the Lyric Young Company; the latter group gives young Londoners the chance to get a start in a working theatre and to audition for professional productions. The result is a chilly piece that connects interestingly with some of Stephens’s habitual concerns - teen violence, primarily - but it’s one that doesn’t, ultimately, rank alongside the playwright’s best work for depth and insight. Full review at OneStopArts.