'Tiny Dancers' review or 'Talking Heads'
Tiny Dancers, Isley Lynn NYT YouTube, 23 July 2020 Written for The Guardian It’ll come as no surprise that Tiny Dancers, a collection of sketches devised during lockdown, is all about the struggle to connect. Written by Isley Lynn and performed by the National Youth Theatre’s Playing Up company, Tiny Dancers reveals a young generation isolated, frustrated and often just very, very sad. We watch two lovers share a dinner (and disastrous fight) over the internet; a young woman talks to a long dead relative somehow contained in cyberspace, and an astronaut tries to make contact from out of space. This vibrant mix never merges into a satisfying whole but there’s an intensity of emotion in here, and a powerful desire simply to be heard, that’s undeniably potent. There’s a general air of restlessness and entrapment to many of the sketches but, while lockdown is mentioned explicitly a few times, the time zone of Tiny Dancers is all over the place. A few of the sketches hav
