Natalie Wilson, Theatre Centre’s Artistic Director, gives AYT an idea of what to expect from its forthcoming conference…

On 20 June, Theatre Centre will host Write Lines, a conference on new writing for young audiences for writers and industry professionals. Guest speakers include playwrights Amanda Dalton, Rob Evans, Bryony Lavery, Philip Osment and Evan Placey, and industry representatives Anthony Banks (NT), Jonathan Lloyd (Polka Theatre) and Purni Morell (Unicorn Theatre).

Theatre Centre is celebrating 60 years of working with writers to produce outstanding theatre for young people, and Write Lines is inspired by my experience of running our Skylines writers programme. Over the past 12 months, Skylines has encouraged 47 emerging writers to develop work for audiences aged four to 18.

I noticed how much energy was generated when writers came together, exchanged ideas, listened, questioned and debated. These moments of reflection and learning seemed to be cherished by the writers, and I want to present this opportunity again but on a bigger scale. New writing for young audiences is a niche area but the beauty is that it is open to all: experienced, emerging, young or old.

The Write Lines conference is designed to bring together writers, artists, commissioners and producers, and to harness a sense of shared purpose and best practice to produce quality new plays. The contributors offer an extraordinary and diverse wealth of experience and perspective which I hope writers will find immensely valuable.

Our contributors will galvanise debate on collaborative working with young people, cross-artform inspirations and making extant stories fresh for a contemporary stage.

Writers will be able to meet like-minded artists and hear from the commissioners about what they want from the plays they stage. TYA-England’s series of debates, Whose Title Is it Anyway?, will take a new turn with Evan Placey (winner of the Brian Way Award 2012) presenting a provocation to four leading new writing commissioners on what writers can offer the programmes of our theatres and companies. Write Lines aims to bring writers and producers together, and perhaps a few new collaborations will be seeded by the end of day. Each delegate will arrive at Write Lines with questions and curiosity. I hope each will leave with some answers, a new question, fresh vigour and a strong line to pursue in their individual practice.

With this in mind, acclaimed playwright Rob Evans whets our appetite by telling us why he writes for young audiences…

Children have not yet had the link between their imagination and their physicality broken. They move and fidget and squirm, and if you get it right they lock on tight to your play with eyes as wide as saucers and they really, really watch. This is so satisfying to me as a writer because it’s how I feel when I’m writing.

Writing is a visceral thing; it can make me cry or explode with laughter. I think this very strong physical reaction is why I work a lot on plays that get performed to young people and their parents and teachers.

The reaction of young audiences in turn affects adults who watch the shows. Adults often think of plays for young people as a kind of babysitting service, then find they get sucked into the story. Theatre that engages both adults and young people equally is something to strive for. When you see young people and adults (their parents or teachers) enjoying the same story, the boundaries we might perceive between young and old seem made of the flimsiest stuff.

Visit the Theatre Centre website for details of the event.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won seven Olivier awards on Sunday night, including Best New Play.

If you’ve seen Curious Incident, which transferred from the National Theatre to the West End’s Apollo Theatre earlier this year, you may not have been too surprised. But how does a bestselling novel transform into an award-winning West End show? A couple of weeks ago, Bloomsbury Institute hosted a talk between author Mark Haddon and acclaimed playwright Simon Stephens, who adapted Haddon’s novel for the stage. AYT’s Becky Brewis reports.

“It was like looking at it through frosted glass”, Haddon said, on the process of having his work adapted, and emphasised the importance of distance. “One of the things I was really hoping for was to sit in the theatre on the first night and have the book returned to me. And, amazingly, that’s what happened.” Fans of the novel will no doubt feel similarly. But although Haddon has written a number of plays, he says he wouldn’t have had the distance necessary to adapt the work himself. When asked why he didn’t cut out the middle man by chair Geoffrey Colman, Head of Acting at Central School of Speech and Drama,  he answered: “for the same reasons surgeons don’t operate on their own children […] you need to approach it clinically.”

Stephens and Haddon met at the National Theatre, when Stephens was on a year-long residency and Haddon on an attachment. At the time, Stephens was writing Motortown, and had read Curious Incident as part of his research on an autistic character. They agree that it was probably theatre director and playwright Dominic Cooke who first suggested, in passing, that Stephens should do the adaptation.

To Stephens, much of the appeal of the novel lay in its ambiguities, and this is something he is proud to have stayed true to in the stage piece. “The interrogations at the heart of this book”, he says, “are the empathetic nature of honesty, and the nature of optimism now.”

Stephens seems to have had little difficulty translating Christopher’s distinctive narrator’s voice to the stage – a leap from the first person that Haddon initially flinched from. For him the main problem was always how to get from Swindon to Willesden on stage. And that’s why he enlisted the help of Frantic Assembly, who did the choreography. A practical move, undoubtedly, but also one which brought an extra dimension to the complex psychology presented on stage: “It struck me that there was something balletic about Christopher’s mind”, says Stephens. “Intellectually, he dances.”

Christopher (played by Luke Treadaway, who won the Olivier Award for Best Actor on Sunday) describes himself as “a young mathematician with some behavioural issues”. The autism label which quickly attached itself to the book is something that Haddon rejects, regretting having “Asperger’s” appear on the cover, especially since it is Christopher’s universally empathetic appeal that has made the book the success it is – a point Stephens is keen to stress: “He’s not an ‘other’”. In fact, as Haddon says, “Christopher represents the complete pleasure of ‘indulging your obsessions’”.

It is clear that from hearing Haddon and Stephens speak that this has been a truly collaborative venture – something Sunday’s Olivier’s were  testimony to, with awards garlanding the whole team, from lighting and sound to acting and directing. Haddon’s book has certainly come a long way. As he said himself:  “For the first couple of years it feels like your baby. It’s about 36 now: it looks after itself. It rings home occasionally. It’s a very robust thing.”

There is no denying that twitter is a powerful tool, and with such power comes a lot of responsibility. When operating social media tools for large companies or for that matter any company, the question of who you put in charge of the controls has be assessed. We bang on about how when using sites such as twitter we don’t want to plug into a direct line of marketing and instead want to hear a voice behind the tweets, a voice behind the company, and quite frankly a human voice not a marketing robot.

Yet with any human there comes mistakes, frustrations and an inevitable muck-up. It just couldn’t have come any worse for the National Theatre when clearly an employee in their digital marketing department let slip a rather frank and honest remark about an article which suggests the “National Theatre should have a Compulsory Demolition Order!” on the Evening Standard website (read the full article here).

Their response: Steve Norris is a giant…

The offensive tweet was quickly deleted from the NT’s feed, and some 50 minutes later, an apology was sent to it’s 9,878 followers stating that:

“Sincere apologies. The NT believes its account has been hacked. Earlier tweet in response to Standard article did not come from the NT.”

Regardless if the NT’s twitter was hacked into, or indeed an employee let slip some thoughts by mistake whilst thinking they were on their personal account, it calls to question just how safe organisations are from slip ups such as this. Earlier in the year we saw an outburst from the Southwark Playhouse twitter where the administrator admitted in a frank tweet that she had gotten fired. Of course the tweet was shortly deleted but not after it was passed around the twitter community… and indeed the tweeter in question still got fired.

Having a huge following as the National Theatre does mistakes come at a huge price, especially when using the language that appeared in the tweet – hacked into or not, someone tomorrow is going to be having some explaining to do.

Tips for keeping your twitter account secure:

1. Regularly change your password, using a combination of letters and numbers/symbols.
2. Limit the amount of people who have access to the account, especially employees who use personal accounts on twitter too.
3. Keep your passwords safely secure in an encrypted file when saving it on a computer.

NT Live

Okay, I’ll admit it – I was initially sceptical about the idea of watching theatre screened in a cinema.

If I wanted to see a play I wanted to see it for real, in the flesh, the way theatre is intended. One of the thrills of live performance is the feeling of intimacy between audience and performer that can only come from being in the room together, and which would surely be lost if you’re separated by a screen and hundreds of miles. Further, there’s the issue of perspective: film forces our perspective, often telling us exactly where we should be looking at any particular time and rarely giving us much choice in the matter; however, by contrast theatre lays it all out there and lets each individual audience member choose where to look, sometimes guiding, but never determining, that perspective. Acting for stage and screen can also be seen as two significantly different disciplines – the camera can capture the tiniest detail, while performing in a large space necessarily demands a larger performance, which when relayed on screen will inevitably seem hammy.

And yet, if the success and acclaim that has greeted NT Live since it launched last summer is anything to go by, it seems that I couldn’t have been more wrong! For this wonderfully simple idea – to film a National Theatre performance and broadcast it to cinemas around the world, including such far-flung places as Mexico, Estonia and Bradford – has attracted considerable audiences, improved access to the National Theatre’s works and enhanced its deservedly good global reputation. NT Live is proof that theatre and cinema need not be competitors, but rather that they can be great allies.

The practical benefits are clear, as NT Live gives people who would otherwise find it difficult to get into London an easy way of accessing the National Theatre’s work. The tickets cost roughly the same as the lowest-priced seats in the house, but with train tickets costing the earth NT Live inevitably works out as a cheaper way to see theatre. Artistically it also offers something above and beyond the regular experience – the camera work and use of close-ups allows the cinema audience a much more focussed view on the action and emotion, while ensuring that the vital intimacy is maintained. On a personal level, what you may lose by not actually being there, you make up for in the sense of being part of a larger community all sharing in this performance at the same time.

The National Theatre isn’t the only company realising the potential that the nation’s cinema screens hold for theatre. Opus Arte broadcasts leading opera, ballet, theatre and music around the country, including performances from Shakespeare’s Globe on Southbank. With opera suffering from even more of an image problem than theatre, these initiatives are leading the way in democratising these art forms. It’s not enough (let alone financially viable) for theatre companies to simply lower ticket prices and expect new people to come to them. Rather, they should be actively exploring new ways of taking theatre out to those new audiences, and cinemas are a great way to market plays to a wider audience. While for some going to the theatre may be an intimidating or unappealing experience for many reasons, going to the cinema is a lot less scary. Padded cinema seats are a damn sight kinder on the posterior than the Globe’s wooden benches too.

NT Live has just announced its second season, which will include Hamlet, Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein and the Broadway hit FELA!, although the venues for the screenings are still to be announced. I’m gunning for my own hometown, but if you know somewhere that would benefit from an injection of culture then there is nothing to stop people putting other locations forward.

I would also love to see more theatres develop their own screening initiatives. The capital may have more than its fair share of top-quality shows, but it would do Londonphiles good to be reminded what the rest of the country has to offer, from places like the Crucible in Sheffield and Edinburgh’s Traverse. We are lucky to have such a wealth of world-class, innovative theatre being produced across the country – through schemes like NT Live we can all start to really make the most of it.