National Theatre Connections 2020: Plays for Young People

Description

National Theatre Connections is an annual festival which brings new plays for young people to schools and youth theatres across the UK and Ireland. Commissioning exciting work from leading playwrights, the festival exposes actors aged 13-19 to the world of professional theatre-making, giving them full control of a theatrical production - from costume and set design to stage management and marketing campaigns. NT Connections have published over 150 original plays and regularly works with 500 theatre companies and 10,000 young people each year. This anthology brings together 9 new plays by some of the UK's most prolific and current writers and artists alongside notes on each of the texts exploring performance for schools and youth groups. Wind / Rush Generation(s) by Mojisola Adebayo This is a play about the British Isles, its past and its present. Set in a senior common room, in a prominent university, a group of 1st year undergraduates are troubled, not by the weight of their workload, but by a 'noisy' ghost. So they do what any group self-respecting and intelligent university students would do in such a situation - they get out the Ouija Board to confront their spiritual irritant and lay them to rest - only to be confronted by the full weight of Britain's colonial past - in all its gory glory. Fusing naturalism, with physical theatre, spoken-word, absurdism, poetry and direct address - this is event-theatre that whips along with the grace, pace and hypnotic magnetism of a hurricane. Tuesday by Alison Carr Tuesday is light, playful and nuanced in tone. And a little bit sci-fi. The play centres on an ordinary Tuesday that suddenly turns very weird indeed when a tear rips across the sky over the school yard. The play touches on themes of friendship, sibling love, family, identity, grief, bullying, loneliness and responsibility. And in the process we might just learn something about ourselves as well as some astronomical theories of the multiverse! A series of public apologies (in response to an unfortunate incident in the school lavatories) by John Donnelly This satirical play is heightened in its naturalism, in its seriousness, in its parody and piercing in its interrogation of how our attempts to define ourselves in public are shaped by the fear of saying the wrong thing. Presented quite literally as a series of public apologies this play is spacious, flexible and welcoming of inventive and imaginative interpretation as each iteration spirals inevitably to its absurdist core. This is a play on words, on convention, on manners, on institutions, on order, online and on point. THE IT by Vivienne Franzmann THE IT is a play about a teenage girl who has something growing inside her. She doesn't know what it is, but she knows it's not a baby. It expands in her body. It starts in her stomach, but quickly outgrows that, until eventually ittakes over the entirety of her insides. It has claws. She feels them. Presented in the style of a direct to camera documentary, this is a darkly comic state of the nation play exploring adolescent mental health and the rage within, written very specifically for today. The Marxist in Heaven by Hattie Naylor The Marxist in Heaven is a play that does exactly what its title page says it's going to do. The eponymous protagonist 'wakes up' in paradise and once they get over the shock of this fundamental contradiction of everything they believe in.....they get straight back to work....and continue their lifelong struggle for equality and fairness for all....even in death. Funny, playful, provocative, pertinent and jam-packed with discourse, disputes, deities and disco dancing by the bucketful, this upbeat buoyant allegory shines its holy light on globalization and asks the salient questions - who are we and what are we doing to ourselves?.....and what conditioner do you use on your hair? Look Up by Andrew Muir Look Up plunges us into a world free from adult intervention, supervision and protection. It's about seeking the truth for yourself and finding the space to find and be yourself. Nine young people are creating new rules for what they hope will be a new and brighter future full of hope in a world in which they can trust again. Each one of them is unique, original and defiantly individual, break into an abandoned building and set about claiming the space, because that is what they do. They have rituals, they have rules, together they are a tribe, they have faith in themselves....and nothing and no one else. They are the future, unless the real world catches up with them and then all they can hope for is that they don't crash and burn like the adults they ran away from in the first place. Crusaders by Frances Poet A group of teens gather to take their French exam but none of them will step into the exam hall. Because Kyle has had a vision and he'll use anything, even miracles, to ensure his classmates accompany him. Together they have just seven days to save themselves, save the world and be the future. And Kyle is not the only one who has had the dream. All across the globe, from Azerbaijan to Zambia, children are dreaming and urging their peers to follow them to the promised land. Who will follow? Who will lead? Who will make it? Witches Can't Be Burned by Silva Semerciyan St. Paul's have won the schools Playfest competition, three years in a row, by selecting recognised classics from the canon and producing them at an exceptionally high level, it's a tried and trusted formula. With straight A's student and drama freak, Anuka cast as Abigail Williams in The Crucible by Arthur Miller, the school seem to be well on course for another triumph, which would be a record. However, as rehearsals gain momentum, Anuka has an epiphany. An experience resulting in her asking searching questions surrounding the text, the depiction and perception of female characters, the meaning of loyalty, and the values and traditions underpinning the very foundations of the school. Thus, the scene is set for a confrontation of epic proportions as Anuka seeks to break with tradition, before tradition breaks her and all young women like her and reality begins to take on the ominous hue of Miller's fictionalized Salem. Dungeness by Chris Thompson . In a remote part of the UK, where nothing ever happens, a group of teenagers share a safe house for LGBT+ young people. While their shared home welcomes difference, it can be tricky for self-appointed group leader Birdie to keep the peace. The group must decide how they want to commemorate an attack that happened to LGBT+ people, in a country far away. How do you take to the streets and protest if you're not ready to tell the world who you are? If you're invisible, does your voice still count? A play about love, commemoration and protest.

Mojisola Adebayo is a playwright, performer, director, producer, workshop facilitator and lecturer. She has a BA in Drama and Theatre Arts, an MA in Physical Theatre and her PhD is entitled Afriquia Theatre: Creating Black Queer Ubuntu Through Performance (Goldsmiths, Royal Holloway and Queen Mary, University of London). Mojisola trained extensively with Augusto Boal and is an international specialist in Theatre of the Oppressed, often working in locations of crisis and conflict. She has worked in theatre, radio and television, on four continents, over the past 25 years, performing in over 50 productions, writing, devising and directing over 30 plays, and leading countless workshops, from Antarctica to Zimbabwe. Her own authored plays include Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey (Lyric Hammersmith and Ovalhouse, London), Muhammad Ali and Me (Ovalhouse, Albany Theatre, London and UK touring), 48 Minutes for Palestine (Ashtar Theatre and international touring), Desert Boy (Albany Theatre, London and UK touring), The Listeners (Pegasus Theatre, Oxford), I Stand Corrected (Artscape, Ovalhouse, London and international touring) and The Interrogation of Sandra Bland (Bush Theatre, London). Chris Bush is a playwright, lyricist and theatre-maker, and was the 2013 Pearson Playwright-in-Residence for Sheffield Theatres. Past work includes A DECLARATION FROM THE PEOPLE (National Theatre); A DREAM, THE SHEFFIELD MYSTERIES, DICKENSIAN, GOODWILL TO ALL MEN, WE'RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER and 20 TINY PLAYS ABOUT SHEFFIELD (all Sheffield Theatres); LARKSONG (New Vic, Stoke-on-Trent); CARDS ON THE TABLE (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester); TONY! THE BLAIR MUSICAL (York Theatre Royal/Tour); SLEIGHT & HAND (Summerhall, Edinburgh. Also live-screened into Odeon cinemas and by BBC Arts); POKING THE BEAR (Theatre503); THE BUREAU OF LOST THINGS (Theatre503/Rose Bruford); ODD (Perfect Pitch/Royal & Derngate Northampton: concert performance) and WOLF (National Theatre Studio: reading). Chris has won the National Young Playwrights' Festival, a Brit Writers' Award, the Perfect Pitch Award and the Sunday Times Edinburgh Competition. Alison Carr is a playwright and radio dramatist. Her plays include: The Last Quiz Night on Earth (Box of Tricks, UK tour, 2020); Caterpillar (shortlisted for the Theatre503 Playwriting Award 2016; premiered at Theatre503, London, 2018) and Iris (Live Theatre, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2016; winner of the Journal Culture Awards 2017 Writer of the Year). Hattie Naylor has won several national and international awards for her plays, and has much of her work broadcast on BBC Radio, including Mathilde, Solaris, The Making of Ivan the Terrible, Ivan and the Dogs (Tinniswood Award for Best Original Radio Drama in 2009), and Clarissa. The stage version of Ivan and the Dogs was nominated in the 2010 Olivier Awards for Outstanding Achievement. Theatre and opera work include Going Dark, Mother Savage, the opera Odysseus Unwound, The Nutcracker, Ben Hur, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Samuel Pepys' Diaries, Piccard in Space, and The Dark Art of Forgetting. Andrew Muir is a critically acclaimed writer for stage and screen with works including Double Sentence and Gold Dust (Deafinitely Theatre/Soho Theatre) and the short film A Family Man. He is the Literary Associate for Deafinitely Theatre for whom he adapted Love's Labours Lost as part of the London 2012 Festival at Shakespeare's Globe. His short radio play The Perfect Non Starter was broadcast on BBC Radio 3's The Verb in 2014. He also lectures at Bournemouth and Poole College. Frances Poet is a Glasgow-based writer. Her stage work includes Gut (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 2018); Adam (National Theatre of Scotland at the Traverse Theatre, 2017); Faith Fall (Oran Mor and Bristol's Tobacco Factory, 2012) and What Put the Blood (Abbey Theatre, 2017). She has also written a number of free adaptations including Strindberg's Dance of Death (Citizens Theatre, 2016) and Moliere's The Misanthrope (Oran Mor, 2014). Silva Semerciyan is a native of Michigan and she moved to the UK in 1998. While at university, she wrote Another Man's Son which won the William Saroyan Prize for Playwriting. Silva Semerciyan's play Gather Ye Rosebuds won the Best New Play award at the Brighton Fringe Festival in 2013. She holds a BA in English from the University of Michigan and an MPhil in Playwriting from the University of Birmingham. She currently lectures in Drama and English in Bristol and is on attachment to the National Theatre Studio. Chris is currently under commission at the Royal Court Theatre, the National Theatre and the Bush Theatre. He was the Channel 4 Playwright in Residence at the Finborough Theatre (formerly the Pearson Playwright's Scheme) in 2014. In his previous career as a social worker, he worked with young people in sexual health, child protection and with young offenders.