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Connections

MAKING CONNECTIONS AT THE NATIONAL
by Heather Neill

The annual Shell Connections Festival in the Cottesloe and the Olivier hits this building like a whirlwind every July. Over six evenings one theatre or the other presents two shows a night, at least one production of each of the 10 plays specially commissioned for teenagers by the National. The young companies come from all corners of the UK and Ireland and most will already have taken part in a festival in one of the 17 regional partner theatres. The NT week represents merely the tip of a creative iceberg, although that seems far too chilly an image for the galvanic energy, freshness and excitement that characterise this unique celebration of youth theatre.

The statistics would make most producers' eyes water. This year there will have been 300 local productions in the Spring, involving some 50,000 young people aged 11 to 19. By this thirteenth Connections year, the fourth sponsored by Shell, more than 80 original hour-long plays for teenagers will have been published and are available from the NT Bookshop.

Top rank writers – the 2006 set includes Gregory Burke, Lin Coghlan, Doug Lucie, Sharman Macdonald, Snoo Wilson and lyricist Don Black – are recruited by Connections producer Suzy Graham-Adriani and her team. One they didn't approach originally was Mark Ravenhill, author of Shopping and Fucking, but he “thought it was a brilliant project”, put himself forward a few years ago and has since become something of a Connections regular. His first play for the scheme was a satire on celebrity, Totally Over You. The next, Citizenship, written last year, is tougher and is one of three Connections plays now being given professional productions in the Cottesloe. The other two are Burn by Deborah Gearing and Chatroom by Enda Walsh. All three tackle difficult subjects, including loneliness, bullying, potential suicide, sexual confusion, self-harm, and teenage pregnancy, but there is humour (sometimes uproarious) too, occasionally a haunting lyricism and always lively, energetic dialogue.

Burn is about the last day of a loner, nicknamed Birdman, his love and loss recalled by “friends” he didn't quite relate to in life. In Chatroom, anonymity and ersatz intimacy lead to two young people goading a third into contemplating suicide, and in Citizenship Tom is having a recurring dream about kissing someone, but is it a man or a woman?

Ravenhill's dialogue is unerring. Last year, one young actor asked her teacher, “Miss, how does this bloke know how we speak?” The answer is that he listens. “I'm not consciously aware that I'm doing it, but I enjoy listening on the bus. The language is partly kind of invented, partly that they are wanting to do an urban version of Jamaican and American gangsta rap. The young are curious about sex but everything is very heightened, so it's funny as well.”

Matti Houghton, only 21 herself, is in all three plays and has one of the lead roles in Chatroom: manipulative, murderous Eva. “I don't 'play' 15. Actually at that age you tend to feel more mature than you do later. I think about character rather than age. Eva is interesting to play because she is totally passionate about what she's doing and then just gives it up. On the internet you can be somebody different, abandon a role without responsibility.” Houghton is well prepared, having spent three years before drama school in a Suffolk youth theatre working with socially excluded kids. She's full of admiration for the plays and for Nicholas Hytner “putting his neck on the line” to produce them. Hytner says that these three were “simply among the best new plays I read last year”.

The NT Director's commitment to the Connections festival itself was clearly demonstrated on the evening of 7 July 2005. While Londoners were coming to terms with the horrors of that morning's suicide bombings and the consequent disruption to transport, the show bravely went on in the Cottesloe. Two shows, actually, the only ones in London that evening. It was the second day of the festival and the young actors from Whickham school in Newcastle and Whizz Kids from Cambridge were already in the building preparing for their performances. The stage management team, led by David Milling, was at work and so were all the Connections personnel.There were two difficulties: it was unlikely that an audience would be able to get to the theatre and Liza Tarbuck, who was to be the evening's MC, couldn't get through. Hytner came cycling to the rescue to be the evening's host. And the audience? Those indomitable theatregoers who had found their way to the Olivier and the Lyttelton were rounded up and offered an unusual, free, alternative.

David Milling admits that the Connections festival is “an exhausting 80-hour week” for him and his three-strong stage-management team, but they love it. “The energy of the young people is infectious and it is such fun”. Some groups bring their own stage-management, in which case they are guided through their cues by the professionals. Each morning the second company to perform sets up and has a run-through on stage, then the first company rehearses and, after a break, performs, thus keeping setting and striking to a minimum. Between times, groups are assigned a guide and provided with activities around the NT building.

In November, David Milling, his deputy and two assistants went “outside the comfort zone” to the annual Connections “retreat” in Bath and, on stage in the Theatre Royal, demonstrated how the experts overcome scene-change challenges. Their audience of 300 teachers and youth leaders had just spent two days intensively workshopping the plays with their writers and professional directors including Edward Kemp, Phyllida Lloyd and Lindsay Posner.

Posner was leading sessions on Feather Boy, a new musical by prize-winning novelist Nicky Singer and screen-writer Peter Tabern, with music by Debbie Wiseman and lyrics by Don Black, writer of 'Born Free' and 'Diamonds are Forever'. With Wiseman at the piano, performing arts students were on hand to act, sing and fight in scenes from this gritty, occasionally violent, but ultimately rather moving tale. Robert, the class nerd, is given a mission by an elderly woman with a guilty secret. A spooky house, the Firebird story and even death are stirred into an emotional mix. Black, who says the lyric writer's art is compression and that rhyme is the glue that holds things together, reckons “kids like challenges”. He was bowled over by the sessions led by Posner: “Good directors dig into character. What looks flat becomes vibrant. The fight – brilliant.” Posner gave useful hints about how to choreograph a beating-up without turning young actors black and blue.

When Gregory Burke, author of Liar, talks about the Connections weekend, the word “fun” occurs often. His play about a boy who repeatedly tells tall tales to get his girl is he says, itself a lie, because it is really a teen movie in disguise. “I lied as a teenager. As a writer I still lie at 38 – for money”. He claims to have slipped his niece £200 to ensure he'd pinned down the teen tribes and their lingo. He has – and, what's more, he's allowed himself an untypical happy ending.

People get hooked on Connections. Janice Greenwood, who teaches at West Anglia College in King's Lynn, is a veteran of six or seven regional festivals and in 2004 her students performed Headstrong, by April De Angelis, in the Cottesloe. This year her new young company is tackling Broken Hallelujah, Sharman Macdonald's piece about teenagers caught up in the American Civil War. The company name? Headstrong. Connections makes connections.

© Heather Neill, March 2006

Heather Neill is a freelance critic and feature writer

Copies of all the Connections plays are available from the NT Bookshop (nationaltheatre.org.uk/bookshop)

www.ntconnections.org.uk