A Harrowing Game Show

Game Over, by Mark Wheeller, benefits greatly from being put on by a youth troupe, the Stephen Joseph Youth Theatre. It’s a brand-new play about their generation and the on-line perils they face.

In harrowing detail, it tells the true story of 14-year-old Breck Bednar, played most convincingly by Sam Tennant, as the naïve ‘gamer’ groomed online and brutally murdered by the person he most trusts and can see no wrong in. Beginning with the murder being first reported, the dreadful story of the events leading up to it are narrated in an immersive flashback that also continues to cover the consequences and aftermath.

A classic example of the relatively new genre of verbatim theatre, a form of documentary drama which is based on the spoken words of real people, it unmistakably has the stamp of authenticity. In many ways this play is just that - a documentary, a pastiche of the views of all who knew the tragic victim, his parents and three siblings, school friends, fellow obsessive ‘gamers’ - in short anybody able to offer any insight into how he came to be groomed by Lewis Daynes (Tom Donoghue), a shadowy coercive presence known only by his voice until finally being unmasked as a sociopathic paedophile with premeditated intent.

Jaime Louth is utterly credible as the intensely suffering mother. Her agony is our agony, the more so perhaps because of the additional presence on stage of four of her harrowed selves, just one of the many adroit touches of directors, Alice Kynman and Cheryl Govan, in a production that makes optimum use of the large ensemble of highly talented young actors.

Christopher Dean is outstanding as the distraught father, Barry, estranged from Breck’s mother and having to live with the knowledge that he might have done more, in several ways, to protect his son. He commendably understates his grief in an age when male tears have come to be expected. His grief seems the more profound.

The play was totally riveting, the audience completely immersed in what was caught in the spotlight before them in the dark round of the stage - a torturous tale with cruel twists of fate, deceptions and misunderstandings, carrying throughout the sense of the inevitability of tragedy. It goes without saying it holds an enormously important contemporary message.

Game Over is at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough on 21 & 22 February.