Actress and West End star Julie Atherton has certainly had a busy career since graduating from drama school in 1999, appearing in shows as varied as Avenue Q, Sister Act The Musical and Mamma Mia! But what sparked her interest in the stage in the first place? Atherton chatted to me during rehearsals for her critically acclaimed performance in the Lyric Hammersmith’s pantomime, Cinderella.

“Well, it was basically all I could do! My drama teacher at Sixth Form got me so interested in it. He really fought for me.” Driven by this passion for the stage and her determination to become a professional actress, Atherton decided to apply for drama school and was offered a place at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts. She reveals with a laugh, “once I’d got in to Mountview I didn’t turn up to the rest of the auditions because I knew I wanted to be there. There’s just something about it.”

It was at Mountview that Atherton’s talent for acting and singing were nourished. Atherton’s advice for young people who want to appear on the West End stage, as she has? Hard work and want it more than anything else; there’s no escaping the fact that competition will always be fierce.

With a history of West End appearances behind her, as well as two studio albums, what prompted the decision to transfer her skills to pantomime at the Lyric for Christmas 2012? She says of this particular production: “there are no football stars to pull in the audience, it’s simply a really good panto with brilliant people in it and brilliant writing. It’s traditional.” If pantomime’s the theatrical equivalent of Marmite, Atherton’s very atuned to how she feels about its traditions. “I hate audience participation. I’m quite shy really. I know that’s weird when you’re an actress, but when I see something with audience participation I always think, ‘Oh no, please please don’t pick on me’.”

Despite her reticence as an audience member, the process of being actively involved in Cinderella has softened Atherton to the genre as a whole – thanks in great part to the fun the cast had in rehearsals. “We all really get on – a bit too well! It’s hard to keep a straight face on stage; it’s a really fun process.” She was well-prepared for those occasions of audience interaction that might call for some quick-thinking improvisation by herself and the other actors.

So what gets you in the mood for a demanding pantomime performance regime? A high-octane rehearsal routine, of course. Atherton reveals that the cast of Cinderella braved the Insanity Workout challenge as part of their warm-up; Atherton sums up this military-style exercise challenge in one word: “horrendous”. “But,” she continues, “it’s keeping us strong and fit. We don’t have understudies so we have to be well.” Clearly, Director Sean Holmes is aware of the physical and mental strength needed to survive a show that runs for weeks at a time. Although the Insanity Workout may not be for everyone, Atherton has obviously come to appreciate the results of improved stamina on stage.

The Lyric’s Christmas production of Cinderella also featured a young ensemble supporting cast, and there was a real community feel within the production. The Lyric has become known for this kind of inclusivity with its programmes for young and local people, so it seems only natural that its pantomime is a fairytale rooted in modern British culture. Atherton tells me: “She [Cinderella] is a bit more loveable because she’s not just this pretty, pretty Cinderella that will obviously get the prince. She can’t dance and, well, actually she can’t do a lot!”

With comedian Mel Giedroyc on board as the wicked stepmother, comedy, fun and frivolity were the buzz words of Cinderella, but Atherton’s taking on a very different challenge now the new year has dawned, as she stars in new musical LIFT, premiering at the Soho Theatre.

LIFT plays at the Soho Theatre until 24 February 2013. For tickets and more information, visit http://www.sohotheatre.com/whats-on/lift/.

Cinderella was the Lyric Hammersmith’s 2012 pantomime. For more about the theatre and its current productions, visit www.lyric.co.uk.

Image credit: Cinderella in rehearsals at the Lyric Hammersmit by Helen Maybanks

Joe Raynor

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Since graduating from RADA three years ago, Morgan Watkins hasn’t exactly opted for light relief when it comes to the plays he has performed in. From Deborah Warner’s production of Mother Courage and Her Children at the National in 2009, to Sean Holmes’s revival of Saved at the Lyric Hammersmith last October, tragic themes have become his daily bread. As he returns to the Lyric to play Eben Cabot in Desire under the Elms – arguably his most challenging theatrical role to date – the themes of Eugene O’Neill’s classic play are no less morose. Like Saved, it even features its share of infanticide.

So what is it about the theatrical dark that keeps drawing the young actor in? “I don’t think it’s particularly a preference I have,” Watkins explains. “It’s just something I seem to end up doing – maybe because I’m not afraid of it. But I do like plays and films that explore the darker issues in life: the more perverse and stranger things. What O’Neill’s done in the play is he’s given these quite simple people in rural America in 1850 this incredibly tragic set of circumstances and let it burn. It’s not a play about society as such, it’s a play about the human psyche. I thought it was fantastic, an amazing piece of writing, and Eben was a fascinating character to explore. He’s got a really volatile way of thinking about things and he can literally flip in a space of five seconds from one opinion to the opposite. He is definitely a very troubled, trapped man.”

In O’Neill’s play, which resituates Greek tragedy in the rural New England of the late nineteenth century, Eben is the youngest son of Ephraim Cabot, a brutal and exacting man who has for years repressed his family. “Eben was 15 when his mother died,” Watkins tells me. “After she died, he had to take over the mother’s role in the house and he began to realise what she’d been through. Eben is a thinker, a sensitive soul. He couldn’t believe the way in which they’d all stood by and let his father slave her to death. So he takes it upon himself to avenge his mother’s death in some way – and he’s kind of working that out as the play starts.” It’s at this point that Eben’s elderly father [Finbar Lynch] suddenly arrives home with a new wife and, as Watkins juicily puts it, “everything goes tits up”.

“It’s a complete shock because he’s 75-years-old: it’s the last thing that they expected”. Less expected still, however, is the adulterous relationship which develops between Eben and his father’s bride, Abbie [Denise Gough]. “I think at first there’s a huge mutual attraction between them: she’s physically very attractive to him, and vice versa. And Eben hasn’t got much experience of women: even though he’s 25, he’s quite a repressed character. He can’t just go to a nightclub and see loads of girls in the way that I might be able to today. But I do think Abbie is the driving force at first.”

Strongly attracted to Eben, Abbie tries to seduce her stepson, but is initially refused. He resists Abbie “because she is counter-intuitive to what he wants to achieve, which is to regain his mother’s farm and put his mother’s spirit to rest.” However, Eben’s reluctance is short-lived. “Later in the play you see that change, and they completely connect at one point.”

Creating a convincing onstage relationship was an intense but oddly uncomplicated process for Watkins and his co-star Denise Gough. “Everyone who has watched the runs has said how believable it is – how believable the feelings are between us. But it’s just that we’ve been committing to the scenes and discussing and working on them. We haven’t done any exercises to get close to each other or anything. I think we’re both quite honest actors, me and Denise. And I think when you both just play the scenes and believe in the scenes and the situation, it just happens.”

But with such extremes on stage – adultery, infanticide and these overpowering echoes of Greek tragedy – how do the performers manage to preserve the realism? “It’s actually quite tough because the themes are so huge. Everything is so dramatic, there’s so much emotion and the stakes are so high. You’ve just got to tell the story at the same time and in fact, in life, in the most tragic circumstances, we don’t always behave epically. There’s a lot of logic and problem-solving as opposed to just dwelling on problems. So I personally try to pick it apart and play the scenes for what they are. Even if the stakes are really high and there’s something really dramatic going on, you’ve got to play it with accuracy and not overdo it. That’s the key. It’s just imagination and commitment, acting, and I think if you put yourself in that situation and believe what is happening then it organically will be what it should be.”

This straightforward commitment to the text is also characteristic of Sean Holmes’s style as a director, and is why Watkins so enjoys working with him. “He’s just very simple, Sean, he’s straight to the point. Some people in theatre and in acting think that we’re doing some sort of sacred, epic thing. And in some ways when it’s great it is kind of like that. But Sean is not the type of guy to think that at all – he just gets in the room and gets on with it. He treats everyone with equal respect, as if you’re just normal. That’s what I find very appealing about working with him, and I find it easy to listen to and respect everything he says. He just picks the play apart: we have a read and we start attacking the text and discussing it.”

With an appreciation for this fairly no-nonsense approach to the job, perhaps it’s no wonder that Watkins is gradually making his mark on the silver and small screen as well as the stage. As he treads the boards at the Lyric, his face will also be appearing on TVs across the country as a regular on the second series of the BBC’s iconic drama, The Hour. So as he becomes more of a household name, I asked him whether he still plans to keep his feet firmly on the stage: “I’m up for doing as much as I can of anything,” he says, “as long as it’s good writing and a good character and good drama for people to watch and enjoy. I do love theatre: I love rehearsing every day, the sort of hands-on side to theatre and the fact that it’s constant. But I also love the medium of film and television – it’s wonderful in its own right. I just want to do great drama really, wherever that is: as long as it’s bloody good.”

Desire under the Elms previews at the Lyric Hammersmith on Wednesday 3 October and plays until Saturday 10 November 2012. For tickets and more information, visit www.lyric.co.uk.

Image credit: Morgan Watkins as Eben Cabot and Denise Gough as Abbie Putnam by Keith Pattison

Sarah Williams

Sarah has an MA in theatre from RADA and King's College London and has written for publications including A Younger Theatre and The Guardian.

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Morning, the new play by Simon Stephens, is not just a play that enforces Stephens’s reputation as one of the most contemporary writers of our generation, but also – we hope – a palpable shift in writers and directors understanding that writing for young people is not seen as a lesser art. Performed by the members of the Lyric Young Company and directed by Lyric Hammersmith’s Artistic Director, Sean Holmes, this stark and bold production takes centre stage at the Traverse Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival before transferring to the Lyric in September. Developed through workshops with the young participants, Stephens’s play looks at the events surrounding a teenage game that goes too far. Friendships strained, police enquiries and a secret buried, Morning is a coming-of-age production that packs a punch.

Cat (Joana Nastari) is leaving for university, but her friend Stephanie (Scarlet Billham) doesn’t want her to leave and tries her best to keep her tied down. As a leaving present, Stephanie offers Cat a threesome with her boyfriend Stephen (Ted Reilly), but their game of kissing and suggestive flirting goes too far, and in a matter of moments Stephen is tied and gagged at the mercy of the two girls. Morning isn’t your usual young persons play – it confounds and provokes, offering a snapshot of youth with a distinct voice that screams and shouts at its audience. With a stark and minimalist design from Hyemi Shin, the feeling that this play has gained much from Stephens last production for the Lyric, Three Kingdoms, is apparent. The quality of work is bold and – whilst I don’t want to generalise to this extreme – it has a feeling of youthful and artistic German theatre, offering no compensations because the actors are young and representing their age onstage. If anything, youthfulness is exposed and celebrated, in all its beauty and brutality.

Billham’s Stephanie is perhaps the most complicated of the characters: a needy, compulsive and manipulative liar, whose anger gets the better of her. Whilst it is difficult to find a connection to the character, Billham does well to turn this into an engrossing performance, especially during scenes with Nastari, whose natural portrayal of Cat works perfectly. Stephen, performed by Reilly, is a capable performer and touches upon a sensitivity and quirkiness that comes from Stephens’s writing, but it is from ensemble as a whole that lifts the text even higher. It is only after several hours of pondering the narrative and directional choices of Morning that the nuances of the production begin to come through. It is for the most part a bold and adventurous leap into the unknown for the cast, harnessing Stephens’s writing with force – and here is where the joy of the show can be found.

Unlike much of the work that seems to be written and engaged for young people, Morning steps the output up a gear. It’s an unflinching look at young people today, caught in the horrors of representing movies and games whilst embracing their sexual freedom. Too often we try to wrap young people in a bubble of protection, but Holmes tears this apart. The starkness and confrontational direction is chilling, and whilst it doesn’t hit entirely in full force, there are moments of intense power that remain with you long after you’ve left the theatre.

**** – 4/5 stars

Morning is playing at the Traverse Theatre until 19 August before transferring to the Lyric Hammersmith. For more information and tickets see the Edinburgh Fringe website.

Jake Orr

Jake is the Artistic Director and Founder of A Younger Theatre. He is a freelance writer and blogger, a theatre marketer and a digital producer. He is also Co-Curator of Dialogue.

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Simon Stephens is truly on the cutting edge of British play-writing: the man that boldly brought the London bombings to the stage in 2008 with Pornography and tackled teenage murder in Punk Rock is also an Artistic Associate at the Lyric Hammersmith. This year the Lyric takes the world premiere of his new play Morning to the Edinburgh Fringe, not with professional actors but with the venue’s own youth theatre. I met Stephens in his cosy Shoreditch office to talk about how this project, with the Lyric’s  Artistic Director Sean Holmes at the helm, came to being.

“I’ve been Artistic Associate at the Lyric since Sean became the Artistic Director there in 2009 and one of the first things that struck us was how, unlike nearly every other theatre in London, it not only feels like it welcomes young people,  it feels actually as if the young people are welcoming the older ones in. It feels like it’s their theatre because there’s such a energy brought about by the young company there. It brings a real sense of ownership.”

The Lyric Hammersmith is renowned for the commitment it places on working with young people. By casting members of the existing young company in the world premiere of his new play, Stephens is offering these aspiring actors a unique opportunity in a country where youth theatre is rarely given the attention it deserves. The inspiration to do this seems to have come from his work with German director Sebastian Nubling. Stephens has the rare accolade of being performed extensively throughout Europe and particularly Germany, where he formed a creative relationship with Nubling, who presented the critically acclaimed Three Kingdoms at the Lyric earlier in the year and who Stephens describes as “one of the most significant directors in the German-speaking world”.

“It’s really interesting to me that every year, or every two years if his schedule permits it, he does a show with the youth theatre in Basel in Switzerland. So you’ve got this kind of curious situation where one of the best directors in the country is making a show with young amateur actors in his home town in Basel and that’s the kind of thing that would be difficult to imagine in the UK. Someone like Marianne Elliot making a show with amateur teenage actors and applying the same kind of level of rigour and hard work and determination that she brings to all of her work to them.” Inspired by the enthusiasm injected into German Youth theatre and the readiness to present it on stage, Holmes and Stephens decided that they would come together to write and direct a play for the young company that could be taken seriously as a piece of work rather than sidelined as a youth theatre production. Stephens was keen to produce something that could translate well not only onto the German stage but throughout Europe.

“I came up with the idea of writing a play and removing all references to real nouns, so this is a play that really could be set anywhere; it could be on the edges of any major city in Europe. Sebastian’s going to direct it in January with the youth theatre in Basel and Sean’s doing it at the Traverse in the summer. The idea being, hopefully, that we bring the Basel production over to London and then take the Lyric production over to Basel, so we do a kind of school exchange. They can all stay in each other’s houses.”

The term coming-of-age can be a very vague and limiting one that suggests a play made up of young teenage characters who must, almost by default, deal with the trials and tribulations of that transition into adulthood and the often hard lessons that are learnt along the way. But what does the term mean for the characters in Morning?

“It’s not a term I’d use to describe the play because I’m not entirely sure what it means. It denotes the possibility of accruing experience but it kind of suggests that after a certain point you stop accruing experience. I can understand why it [Morning] is described as a coming-of-age play. That kind of makes sense on a marketing level, but I think the play is the most moral play that I’ve written. It’s a play about murder and the emotional consequences of having murdered, and what it feels like to kill and how you continue to live, having killed. I think that’s something that fascinates me – it’s always been something of on obsession, especially in my writing about young people.”

He goes on to jokingly suggest that Herons, Punk Rock and Morning could be described as an accidental trilogy of plays about teenagers killing each other. All jokes aside, it is surely this tendency to delve into complex and unsettling ideas that truly marks Stephens out as a great British dramatist.

“The play started off  interrogating the question, ‘is it possible for people to behave without motivation?’ Recent neurological science would suggest that the way we’ve interpreted behaviour for the post industrial period – along the linear lines of causation and action - is inaccurate, by which I mean it’s not as we thought for the last 100 years that people do things for a reason, but rather they do things randomly and then in the aftermath of behaviour they make sense of what they’ve done by imposing a narrative upon it. I was really interested in finding a form that dramatised that.”

The play centres on Stephanie, a young girl who kills her boyfriend in a seemingly unprovoked attack, something which Stephens tells me was influenced by the horrific true story of a young man in wales. “The play is not about that, but it’s a consideration of what that must have felt like. I started off with the question, ‘is it possible for somebody to do something as extreme as murder without any apparent motivation and without any consequence?’ What I ended up writing about was the moral horror of what it feels like to kill. You take an action as horrific as a murder and staging that necessarily demands the question, why did she kill him? And actually by creating a dramatic language that forces the audience to think, it engages not just the intellect and the process of constructing narrative, but also the intellect and the process of constructing morality. Structurally, the comparison was made by someone yesterday that it’s like Macbeth in that the murder happens really near the beginning and the play is about the fallout of the murder. In that sense, like Macbeth. There is a sniff of a morality tale about it but y’know, there are some good jokes in it as well.”

Morning will be presented at the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh from the 1 to 19 of August as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, after which it will return to London for a short run at the Lyric Hammersmith.

Image credit: Simon Kane

Chelsey Burdon

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