21. Editor's note: Due to space restrictions and the holiday, this review is appearing unusually late.

Making his debut on the theatrical scene last week was Dwayne Saunders, author of United Productions' "Reality Street''.

Employing a series of musical "skits'', set to music that includes Bob Marley, Desire and Marvin Gaye, the purported aim is to wake Bermuda up to the reality and extent of discontent that smoulders among our disaffected youth.

Each skit is complemented by a dance sequence which echoes the theme of the preceding scene. Choreographed by the immensely talented Suzette Harvey, and beautifully performed by her excellently trained company, it fell to the medium of dance to provide any sense of theatrical eloquence.

City Hall is not the ideal place to test the work of an inexperienced writer.

This show would have been more suited to a workshop production. As it is, the show, apart from the dance scenes, could most charitably be described as a `work in progress' rather than a finished product.

Suzette Harvey is also the director of "Reality Street'' and she has succeeded in bringing out the best -- and certainly, a fine vitality in her cast. Primarily dancers, they cope well, on the whole, with their speaking roles. Special mention should be made, too, of Gregory Wade's effective set design, showing the facade of a street, one of its buildings girdled with graffiti and called "Spinning Doors''.

Mr. Saunders, genuinely concerned about Bermuda's problems, is not the first (nor, I fear, will he be the last) to mistake the theatrical stage for parliament or the pulpit. This is sad, since theatre has always been, and still is, one of the most potent forces in effecting social or political change. The art of the playwright is not to preach, but to illustrate. Most would agree, for instance, that a musical such as `West Side Story' did more to demonstrate the tragedy of racial and social conflict than any amount of postulating speeches.

Without a strong story line to support the various characters, Saunders fails to establish any kind of continuing rapport. He could, for example, have developed the tragedy of the young junkie ("Yesterday she was a Jezebel /Today she is a Zombie''). This role was performed by Lauren Francis, a dancer of beautiful technique and range of expression.

Using the medium of verse -- always a tricky form of communication in that it so rapidly degenerates into doggerel -- Saunders highlights the experiences of life on the back streets, where drugs, disease, violence, and teenage pregnancy flourish, and where hope for a better future has apparently been all but abandoned.

With the cast marching in through the audience of City Hall, the sketches proceed to illustrate the way in which frustration erupts into violence: only momentarily does the retort of a pistol shot bring the young people to their senses. Then it's back to hanging around the streets, the boredom relieved by a spot of gombey dancing and a desultory game of football interrupted by a pair of brutish policemen searching for drugs.

The girls, meanwhile, reproach one of their own for being duped into pregnancy by a strutting macho man -- a sketch which leads seamlessly into an effective dance sequence illustrating the roles played by long-suffering women over the centuries.

Lack of money for the necessary "fix'' finds the males deciding to rob the next passerby: the ensuing fight leads to death by gunshot wounds -- "and all for ten dollars!'' The rest of the proceedings are devoted to a hectoring, lengthy and overtly racist sermon, in which 300 years of "oppressive'' British rule, Police, Customs, and Loan Officers, and the whole panoply of the "Eurocentric life-style'' are all trotted out, in cliched style as reasons why Bermuda's `under class' has not become the upper class.

Dwayne Saunders' altogether admirable wish to inspire pride amongst this upcoming generation is clouded by some eccentric, and dangerous, ideas on education. These seem to have been imported wholesale (as is usually the case, these days) from campuses in America, where academic standards are increasingly being sacrificed on the altar of racial and sociological rhetoric.

While he advocates education over incarceration (and most would agree with that sentiment), the audience is left wondering just what he would like to see taught apart, of course, from black history. For in the programme he writes, "I feel it is more important to teach children `who' he or she is, than to teach them english (sic), math or science''. Just how this is to be accomplished without the aforementioned mastery of English, or how rejection of basic academic knowledge is to improve the quality of life on `Reality' -- or any other Street -- is left for us all to ponder upon.

PATRICIA CALNAN