These Youths Be Protesting

Life can be complicated when you want to save the planet. Members of the Sunlake Downs High School Recycling Club meet to start the process but struggle to make much progress.

15-year-old Lemon (Karrine Kannan) cares about the environment but probably cares more about being school captain. The bossy boots tells the meeting, she’s projecting not yelling as per her training at a leadership forum.

She went on a date at the age of nine with Jimbo (Hamish Alexander). With a bad mullet, he’s constantly in detention – recently for blowing up a can of deodorant. But he’s smarter though than he looks.

There is Mandi (Mây Trần) who is very cool with a nose ring and Georgie (Rachel Thomas) who has a huge conflict of interest – her father works in the mining industry.

The first suggestion at the meeting is to introduce new recycling bins at the school.

One of the student’s retorts ‘so you’re gonna buy something brand new in order to “be more sustainable”.’

Then some money arrives from a local politician – a very cheap looking large cardboard cheque for $500.  It’s another compromise they must grapple with. The politician is using the donation to greenwash his interests in a new coal mine at their favourite sand dune.

These Youths Be Protesting is a funny and though provoking play which is very relatable for the times.

Social media and hormones play their role in the drama.

The writer and director Izabella Louk has a good ear for the language of teenagers and puts her finger on the inherent conflicts of middle-class environmentalism.

The cast gave passionate and spirited performances with plenty of action and laughs to keep the audience engaged and entertained through-out the one act play.

KXT on Broadway is a small box theatre with audience on either side of the stage with no wing space.  It was fine for the start of the play set in the school classroom, but was less effective when the drama moved to the sand dune.

Having a cast of just four was limiting for a drama set in a school yard and it would be exciting to see this play expanded,  to allow for more scope for future performances.

David Spicer

Photographer: Karla Elbourne

Frank Hatherley also reviewed These Youths Be Protesting

Despite its difficult-to-say title – try repeating it three times quickly! - this is a delightfully funny play on a deadly serious theme. Four 15-year-olds put their scattered energies into challenging Climate Change and the result is a win for their school, their outer Sydney suburb and, more particularly, their highly entertained Broadway audience.

The play, by Izabella Louk, was a finalist in the 2024 Martin Lysicrates Prize and is a cracker. I’ll bet the winner didn’t give so much to its audience. Ms Louk went on to beautifully direct this excellent first production.

Three students, members of the Sunlake Downs High School Recycling Club, have a lunchtime meeting. They put out many more chairs than they’ll need. In fact, they get one more student than expected - Jimbo (Hamish Alexander), and he’s been expelled from class and has nowhere else to go.

The Club is led by Lemon (Karrine Kanaan), an ambitious girl with definite views on her future progress: she’s going to be school captain. Then there’s Georgie (Rachel Thomas), a quiet one who wants to stay out of the limelight, and Mandi (Mây Trần ), a truculent Vietnamese-Australian, who questions just about everything.

How this mix-matched team ever proceed with anything is quite delightfully handled in the text. But they make it to the Big Smoke, outside the very office of Greg Moresby, member for their constituency, who (in an off-stage meeting with Lemon) gives the club a cheque for $300. It’s a bribe, of course. 

Mandi and Georgie turn Lemon around and the tiny club goes global via a television report. Soon teachers in Lithuanian want to send money.