Giving youth and its obsessions full, unprejudiced treatment

Playwright Faith Ng takes myriad teenage drama and turns it into nuanced elegy in Hard Mode, Checkpoint Theatre's effort at taking Gen Zers and Gen Alphas seriously on their own terms.

- Clement Yong

At slightly more than two hours without intermission, it is the sort of meandering play that prioritises character development over plot, doing justice to each of five characters a la manga.

But it is also one that manages to repeatedly bring fresh tears into the audience's eyes with just a few lines of incisive dialogue, occupying that sincere tonal space that opens up access to memories of what it was like to be young for even those at some distance from teenage-hood.

It does so while fully immersing itself in the diction of the day without caricature: Skibidi, by this reviewer's count, was used just once in an offhand manner.

Friendships - in particular male ones - shy love, sibling dynamics and school bullying - none of these are deemed too childish or too trivial to be given full-fledged treatment in a three-part, moveable set beautifully designed and lit by Petrina Dawn Tan, and which elicited wows from the participatory, youthful audience when it first emerged from the darkness.