Smoke & Oakum

Following on from Smoke & Oakum’s 2015 hit show Cornermen comes Happy Dave, also by Oli Forsyth – a show questioning what youth culture today really means and the ethos of Generation Y.

David Blessed spent the 90s DJ-ing in fields during the rave era, dropping beats for thousands of young revelers. But now, aged 45, he’s working a dead-end job in an advertising firm selling things he hates. However, old habits die hard and soon Dave leads a group of disenchanted young millennials back into the fray.

In 1992, nearly 50,000 people gathered for an illegal rave at Castlemorton that lasted a week. Two years later, the new Criminal Justice Act brought that entire movement, one that had marched on Parliament and occupied Hyde Park, to a close. Out of the ashes came the ‘millennials’ – a generation characterised by its uncertainty.

The rave scene has now changed – today youth culture is centred around expensive festivals, headlined by aging rockers with tickets costing hundreds of pounds. It seems the millennials are a generation that is constantly recycling things rather than forming their own identity. As David Blessed says in the play, It’s ’cos they’re lost. Whole lot of ’em. I see an entire nation, full of young people who have no idea what’s happening to them. They feel no sense of unity or belonging… They’re just lost.