Review: "Move to Junk"

The theatre play “Move to Junk”, written by Peter Griffith in 2016, is about a girl who is bullied on the internet. The author chose the topic of cyberbullying because it is a current topic: many young people don’t know about the risks of the internet.

 

There was a one-hour-performance of the play in our school on 7th February 2017. The characters are Stuart, Amanda, Donny and Kylie.

 

The play is about a girl from Oxford who is new at Sandown Court School. Her class doesn’t like her because she speaks with an Oxford accent and because she is a better footballer than the boys. Only Stuart tries to help her settle in the new class.

At a party, Kylie, a girl from the class who likes Stuart, tries to make him her boyfriend but Stuart isn’t interested in her. Kylie blames Amanda for this.

 

Soon after that an email with a photo “goes viral”. It shows Amanda’s head photo-shopped on a naked body and the email says that she offers “free sex” and gives her phone number. All of her classmates make fun of her and bully her. Amanda even gets phone calls from a robotic voice that tells her to take her life.

 

Stuart thinks that the emails come from Kylie because she is jealous but in the end Kylie finds out that Donny is responsible for the messages. Donny is embarrassed and admits his deed. Then Stuart wants to visit Amanda at home to talk to her but she doesn’t open the door. It is too late…

 

After the play we had the chance to talk to the actors and could find out some more information:

 

Stuart was played by Liam (26), Donny was played by Marc (26), Kylie was played by Kate (25) and Ffeon (22) played Amanda. Because they are all from Great Britain we wanted to know if they were homesick. They said that they missed their families and friends and sometimes the British food, too.

 

Acting is their main job and they have been acting professionally since they were 19 (Liam/Marc), 21 (Kate) and 18 (Ffeon) years old.

 

We also asked if they get stage fright: Marc said that he had got stage fright when he was a child and when he played in musicals in front of thousands of people. Now he has got used to performing.

 

We think the play was very good because it was very interesting and the play made us think about this topic.

 

- Anna & Chantal (year 9)