pLAY sTYLE
So Young is a melancholic, disenchanted and mysterious larp experience that follows the lives of a class of students at the historic Devington University. Amidst final exams and ancient traditions, the stories of boys and professors intertwine, take shape and collide, set against the backdrop of an uchronic nation in which only a fraction of the students survive to adulthood.
A story of uneasy friendship, competition and rules as old as England itself.
THE COLlEGe
Suit-and-tie classes, dormitory parties, secret initiations in the heart of the woods. A network of rules, written and unwritten, that dominate the lives of the students. One cannot tread on grass unless one has sworn allegiance to a statue hidden in a well, nor serve oneself porridge at breakfast before the Grand Master: so says the First Law. The body is sacred, it cannot be mistreated or despised in any way. Blood counts, but even more so commitment, dedication, study, flair and ingenuity. And the family one chooses: the one with whom to share a stolen bottle of alcohol, or a forbidden cigarette. The one with whom to hide under the covers, before the last dance, before the last exam, before the last day.
A DISsONANT LaRP
So Young brings to the stage the everyday life of Devington University's final year students, with their passions and insecurities, their expectations and disappointments. It transports the players into a romantic story about the old traditions of English colleges, but also into the cruel whirlwind of the competition for survival. So Young is not a violent story, nor a tale of rebellion: it is a play of dissonance and hypocrisy, where only today matters, because tomorrow is inevitable. Where what happens outside the school stays outside the school.
A jarring larp of compromises and respectability, where what counts is the highest mark, the cricket match or a whispered password. Even if outside death awaits.
aN UCHRoNIAn LARP
This is not our England. This is not our 1993. For a long time now, this has been the way things have been done in this world. There is no surprise, no astonishment and no rebellion against the system. It is just another tradition to add to the long list of rules to be respected. Quite simply. For decades, no matter how many, people have thrived on the sacrifice of a few: Donors sacrifice themselves on the altar of science, donating organs and tissue for the advancement of science and the salvation of the Gifted.
So Young is an uchronian larp, where the class division of English society is an unshakeable and incontrovertible reality. How and why it came to be is not part of our game. The injustice of the system is not up for discussion. During the LARP, you will never be asked to comment on government choices, let alone act to subvert them.
With the exception of the extraordinary scientific progress, our scenario is identical to the 1990s we know, with its music and contradictions, the overwhelming pop secretly listened to in a bathroom, the garish colours softened by school uniforms. Outside, the world is a whirlwind of unshakeable hope, faith in progress and science, the child of a decade of economic boom and social achievements.
INsPIRATIONS
So Young is a larp inspired by the novel 'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro. However, we want to emphasise a fundamental difference: unlike the novel, the protagonists are real people. There will be no clones, neither overtly nor covertly. There will be no surprises or stories to unravel, nor any kind of mystery about the nature of Donors and Gifted. Everything is as it seems: a carousel of mysterious lore, intertwined with the cruel and rational reality left outside the elegant corridors of Devington University.
OUR MOoD AND OUR SToRY TAKE THEIR InSPIRATION FROm:
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (novel)
Never Let Me Go, Mark Romanek (movie)
The Secret History, Donna Tartt (novel)
Dead Poets Society, Peter Weir (movie)
The Rules of Attraction, Bret Easton Ellis (novel)
The Promised Neverland, Kaiu Shirai e Posuka Demizu (manga)
3%, Pedro Aguilera (TV series)