Eleanor Turney
Managing Editor

Making a four-hour round trip to Stratford-on-Avon might not be the most sensible way to spend a Wednesday, but when the RSC’s A Tender Thing is at the other end, it’s more than worth the trip. Interviewing Edward Bond was a personal highlight, although he remains my most terrifying interviewee to date… Organising the Edinburgh Critics Team with Jake and C venues was wonderful – I’m delighted we were able to offer eight young people the chance to go to the Fringe and to get so much out of their time there. The Chekhov revivals across London (especially Uncle Vanya at the Print Room and The Seagull at Southwark Playhouse) have made me a very happy bunny, and in a year of Shakespeare, Theatre Delicatessen’s Henry V  and Filter Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Lyric are my standout shows. I’ve rounded off the year seeing two wonderful Christmas shows: NIE’s Hansel and Gretel at the Tobacco Factory and Bristol Old Vic’s wonderful Peter Pan.

Laura Turner
Features Editor

2012 has been a busy and really exciting time for the Features sections. We’ve chatted to Michael Grandage, Philip Ridley, Kate Tempest, Steven Berkoff and Jack Thorne to mention just a few. We had our biggest and best yet coverage of the Edinburgh Fringe and over the year our growing team of writers have profiled the work of Simon Stephens, The Paper Birds, English Touring Opera, Northern Broadsides, Edward Bond, the RSC and the Old Vic New Voices – and that’s just the tip of the ice berg as we went behind the scenes at theatres across the country and had exclusive content from the National Theatre Connections Directors’ Weekend.

As Features Editor, there have been so many highlights over the year and it’s been a privilege to work with the AYT team and all the dedicated features writers who invest so much time and energy into the pieces they write, whether they’re interviewing DC Moore, getting the exclusive info on London’s newest theatre or blogging about their experiences of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. On a personal note, I’ve loved some of the recent features I’ve worked on from TheatreCraft to Talawa Theatre Company’s new take on King Lear earlier this winter. In terms of stand out performances, Love Love Love at the Court was pretty unforgettable, as were Sixty Four Miles and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde at Hull Truck. I’ve still not seen Matilda – number one aim for 2013!

Becky Brewis
Commissioning Editor:

My AYT year was gently ushered in with a few words from Coney practitioners, scrawled on a scrap of paper: “undertaker”. This was one of the theatre company’s famous “days of play”, held at Battersea Arts Centre, where a group of us became immersed in the life of a small town, taking on roles and spreading gossip.  It was a chance to meet people, to interact in new ways and to experiment. Things got raucous but I didn’t have to take out any dead bodies.

For another AYT feature earlier this year I met Fiona Lindsay, the Creative Producer of Digital Theatre Plus to hear about how this brilliant online theatre tool is putting great British theatre on a global stage, by making artistic, high-quality films of stage shows. I got to watch Frantic Assembly’s Lovesong in my own bed. It might not be able to bring it to your bedroom, but Shakespeare’s Globe is similarly keen to extend its reach, as I discovered when I spoke to the Education department’s Jamie Arden about Merry Meetings, the programme that brought seventeenth-century drama to Latitude Festival. They had to fight off the groupies.

Another annual festivity – for those involved at least – is the Old Vic New Voices, 24 Hour Plays, and it was a real pleasure to talk to some past writers, actors, producers and directors about the legacy of the project. I heard how being part of what director Steve Winter describes as the “OVNV family” has shaped them: “I always refer back to the 24 Hour Plays as being the project that made me realise anything was possible,” said Sophie Watson, one of last year’s participants.

And as the year draws to a close it’s looking like anything is possible for AYT too. It was a pleasure to represent AYT at last month’s TheatreCraft conference at the Royal Opera House, where we met so many budding theatre writers. But the main personal highlight for me this year was sub-editing the truly excellent work of the AYT reviewers up in Edinburgh over the summer. At my computer in South London I could practically smell the rancid beer mats, and it was a real treat to have the festival brought to life by such a talented team.

Ryan Ford Iosco
Reviews Co-Ordinator

The reviews section of AYT has grown quite a bit over the last year. Our reviewers now attend shows regularly at venues such as the National Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre and the Almeida Theatre as well as promoting new/young companies that are just emerging. 2012 saw AYT review our first film, Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables (which will be out on 11 January 2013), as well as attend the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a team of reviewers who covered an unimaginable amount of shows. AYT’s reviewers have been all over the UK and have covered many different aspects of the theatre world this year. As 2012 closes we are preparing for a 2013 that already looks busier and more exciting.

Catherine Noonan
Blogs Editor

What have been the best AYT moments of 2012? Well, from a personal point of view, the articles I enjoyed writing the most tend to hail from the beginning of the year: interviewing Louise Rennison, who was both wonderfully mad and incredibly interesting; finding out more about female-led theatre with Shared Experience’s Polly Teale; writing about crowdfunded theatre and subsequently getting my first article published on the Guardian website. There have been many wonderful moments working with AYT’s bloggers: the great content that our regular contributors turn out week after week; connecting with theatre lovers from across the Atlantic; publishing brilliant guest blogs (such as this one and this one). And, finally, I couldn’t round up the year without mentioning how rewarding it is be part of a site that has produced outstanding Edinburgh coverage and collaborated with some wonderful organisations (the Royal Opera House! The Guardian! C venues! TheatreCraft!) So, a big thank you to all of AYT’s editors, writers and readers of 2012. It’s been a pleasure.

Jake Orr
Founder and Artistic Director

Reading through the AYT Editors 2012 Highlights above, I am left immensely proud. When I founded A Younger Theatre in 2009 I had no idea that some three years later we’d be partnering with the Royal Opera House, unleashing a team of critics at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival or that we’d pass 8,500 followers on Twitter. AYT is built and maintained by a wonderful team of young people who pour their time, hearts and energy into making it a success. So firstly, a big thank you to all our writers and Editorial Team.

2012 was a curious year for theatre. We saw an influx of German practitioners shaking up British theatre with the likes of Thomas Ostermeier’s Hamlet, Sebastian Nubling’s direction of Simon Stephens’s Three Kingdoms and Cate Blanchett in Gross und Klein. LIFT Festival threw up some challenging pieces including Back To Back’s Ganesh vs the Third Reich, and an epic eight-hour performance of Gatz by Elevator Repair Service. In children’s theatre I was transfixed by Little Angel Theatre’s The Tear Thief and Mark Arends’s Something Very Far Away at the Unicorn Theatre. Whilst in Edinburgh I was left weeping at And No More Shall We Part at the Traverse Theatre, and positively bursting with energy at Charlotte Josephine’s Bitch Boxer. Let’s not forget the flop that is Viva Forever! which made me question why we even make theatre, terrible, terrible theatre.

In my blogging I found myself questioning how I respond to theatre in an apology to Melanie Wilson, and later considering how theatre and emotion are entwined after the death of a family member. Then there are the numerous events AYT hosted with our readers, including a digital takeover of the Royal Opera House, live blogging The Junction’s Sampled Festival, and two trips to the Old Vic Theatre. We were media partners with C venues at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and also for TheatreCraft at the Royal Opera House.

Our writers have contributed 905 posts to A Younger Theatre, generating nearly a million pageviews. All of this delivered by volunteers under the age of 26, and showing that young people have a passion for theatre just as much as everyone else. Bring on 2013.

Article image by Jen Collins.

Feathers opens with a glorious explosion, immdiately arresting the audience. The company’s powerful tones fill the theatre, and actors face all directions, taking us all in. Although I knew it was a play for predominantly for children, I was immersed instantly. 
 
The story rapidly unfolds and the cast have a colossal presence – their energy reaches out to us in our seats. This soaring energy works wonders on the children watching, as it does on us all. Sometimes, our minds will drift away from the action straight in front of us. This is often nothing to do with the skill of the actor, it can simply be due to having a big ‘to do’ list tapping at our shoulder. However, the actors in this production don’t allow this to happen, especially in Act One.

Craig Vye and Nelly Harker portray the young parents of Shylyla beautifully. Vye is completely sincere when he realises how excited he will be to have daughter.  It is a touching moment that tugs at our hearts. 
 
The narrative is punctuated exquisitely by the three neighbours throughout the first half. Their triad seems very enjoyable for the actors, as well as for us watching. Gender swapping of this nature is a winner, and these three bring clarity and warmth to their gossiping dialogue. They also act as a buffer to the more serious undertones of the story.  
 
The Young Company’s input is electric throughout. The young actors contribute hugely to the dramatic ambience of the piece, although this energy dips slightly in the second half. In saying this, the piece was of such a high voltage in general, a slight drop probably seemed more significant than it actually was. The party scene in the first half stands out, throwing me back to childhood, with bright eyes and new hope.

The direct style of address is delightful: “I am now a new character” is an amusing tone and made all the difference. This honesty works very well to keep the children interested, without patroniing them in a pretentious way that some theatre for young people does with elaborate tricks etc.

Harker’s vocal clarity and skill is apparent through all her characters. She does well never to push, which is almost inevitable in a high- energy and high emotion show. Matthew Hendrickson and Adam Venus’s historians fill the house with hilarity of the highest degree. The moustaches, wigs and ‘adult’ touches are all very skillfully placed in between the action onstage. Cerith Flinn’s expression and versatility is hugely impressive throughout. His Welsh builder especially tickled me, being from Bridgend myself.  The physical embodiment of character and context is what gives Flinn the edge here. Deeivya Meir’s beauty and ease on stage are a pleasure to witness. She captures youth and the instinct of a young woman with accuracy and integrity.

The epic story gives us what the text promises, a “Cosmos of Wonder”. The wonderfully positive message of moving forward means that the story doesn’t get dull, and we are kept wanting more to unfold and delight our senses. The spacious and atmospheric set is held perfectly in the Southwark Playhouse. Its rough and ready setting is perfect. The actors reach to the edge of the text and beyond, taking our imaginations with them. A thoroughly magical journey for all involved.

Feathers in the Snow is playing at Southwark Playhouse until 5th January. For more information and tickets, see the Southwark Playhouse website.

Now in its second year, Theatre Uncut has gone truly global. An initiative established in 2010 to respond to the cuts being imposed on the UK by the coalition government, in 2011 it took responsible, proactive theatre-making to exciting new heights. This year, the preview shows that were supposed to simply raise awareness secured them three awards at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and in the recent “week of international action”, there were over 180 performances of the 2012 Theatre Uncut plays in the UK and across the globe, in countries including Romania, Chile and South Africa.

For co-artistic director Emma Callander, discussing politics through the medium of theatre was a natural progression. Theatre Uncut itself began as a conversation between co-artistic director Hannah Price and playwright Mark Ravenhill in October 2010. Price contacted her favourite playwrights to ask if they would assist her in the project designed as a week of action to explore current politics. Each playwright wrote a ten minute play which could be downloaded online and performed rights free by anyone who wanted to during one week. The format followed suit this year, with performances taking place across the globe from 13 to 18November.

Theatre has “forever been a medium of debate and discussion because of its live nature,” observes Callandar. “It’s the most immediate form of being able to explore big issues through having the distance of a narrative, character or metaphor. You can really access these issues in a much deeper way.” Back in March 2011, there were 87 performances of plays written by the likes of Jack Thorne, Clara Brennan, David Grieg and Dennis Kelly. The first year had a national focus as it was in response to the UK cuts and so were mainly performed in the UK “in community centres, schools, theatres and universities, by professional actors and Arab groups all across the board and then some of the performances happened in Chicago, in Berlin and in Dublin, so it became clear that it wasn’t just the UK that was interested in speaking about these issues.”

In response – which is of course precisely what it does best – Theatre Uncut 2012 has gone global. Contacting playwrights in countries experiencing the greatest political upheaval was an active attempt to discover what the situation is from the population’s point of view, not from that of the national or international press. “We wondered whether there was a reason for us to do Theatre Uncut again or whether it was just something of its time, but sadly we realised that it was important for this project to happen because there were a lot of people who needed to discuss and to hopefully take action on some of the injustices going on around them.” Ten-minute plays from Egypt, Greece, Spain, Iceland, Syria, the UK and USA all follow a brief to “respond to the political situation in your own country with the future in mind”.

Callander explains, “We admitted that we were just very confused and that all of the news that we read, really was quite overwhelming… we wanted to know what the political situation was in their own words and then we’ve shared that all over the world.” Theatre Uncut has become a distinctly revolutionary and creative way for people to become part of larger conversations happening not just in our country but around the world, whether they seek to support resistance, take a stand for what they believe in or simply find out more about what’s going on and form their own opinion on it.

Each play has an element of the local and the universal, perfectly encapsulated in Clara Brennan’s play Spine. Written about the closure of British libraries, something particular to the arts in our own country, Callander comments: “we’ve recently had an email from a South African girl, who’s performing in Swaziland and that’s the play that’s touched her the most and she’s been telling us about how it is really helping her to express an issue that she has about libraries in the black communities of South Africa and the complications that still remain in education that are left over from apartheid”. This must be a hugely exciting moment for everyone behind the scenes at Theatre Uncut, when something that seemed so British actually has such huge resonances. “It’s like a big international exchange of ideas through theatre,” agrees Callander.

“Every play is as important and vital as the next. The audience will be in for an amazing treat because of the scale and breadth of what these plays approach and tackle. My dream would be to have all the writers in the same room so they could discuss their ideas.” The intention is that audiences will see a snapshot of the political situation in each country and have a chance to respond directly afterwards with special guests leading the discussions such as comedian Mark Thomas and journalist Owen Jones. “I’m a huge believer that theatre is a really powerful tool for positive social change. In times like these [when faced with opposition] theatre finds its power again.”

Amidst the recent politicisation of our generation – from student protests to creative enterprises like these – we are clearly ready to stand up and make ourselves heard. Callander admits that the August 2011 riots had an over-arching negative effect, but that “cannot cloud the fact that [our politicisation] was one of the most important things that has happened in this country in terms of politics and young people’s engagement with politics since the conservatives were last in power in the late 1980s.” The reason why Theatre Uncut is taking a second bite of the cherry this year is because the energy required for protest can only be sustained for so long. “It falls to people like us in theatre to sustain that level of activism… we keep bringing these issues back to the fore so people carry on thinking and talking about them.”

That’s not to say that Theatre Uncut is just for young people. Anyone can engage or be involved but the important thing for Theatre Uncut is to make sure that after the buzz about protests or riots has died down in the media and the next latest scandal or disaster takes its place in our minds, we don’t forget that our daily lives are still being affected by decisions being made by the people in power and the cuts are going to keep on coming. In our age of austerity with the arts experiencing the brutal lash of funding cuts, Theatre Uncut is turning the tables to question those who have the power to question us. With two successful years under its belt, Theatre Uncut is certainly keeping up its side of the conversation so it falls to us to keep up ours. After all, if we don’t talk, think and play, how can we expect anything to change?

Find out more about Theatre Uncut at www.theatreuncut.com.

Image credit: Zawe Ashton in Theatre Uncut 2011 at Southwark Playhouse. Image by Theatre Uncut.

In the austere surroundings of the Southwark Playhouse, this version of The Seagull dispenses with hysterics and melodrama. What we are given instead is a crystallised and understated production, dripping with acting talent and subtle nuance.

In Anya Reiss’s new version of Chekhov’s play (from a literal tranlastion by Ilona Kohanchuk), much of the hysteria inherent in many productions is stripped away, along with the need for complicated set or costumes. The language is naturalistic despite the directness with which the characters speak – lines such as Masha’s terrifyingly depressed “I’m in mourning for my life” are given new breath. Reiss puts everyday words in the characters’ mouths and shows the mundanity and petty jealousies of their lives with precision.

This simplicity, enhanced by modern dress and minimal staging (Jean Chan), gives the cast room to shine. Under Russel Bolam’s deft directorial hand, this cast fills the vaults of the Playhouse with the deep melancholy of Chekhov’s Russia; the futility of spoilt and wasted lives is inescapable. And yet, there is the smallest expectation of better things right up until the end – dreams that the sorry, tangled relationships will resolve themselves, that the sick will be healed, that each character will get what they crave. The twists of fate are all the crueller for the tinges of hope that remain.

The cast are outstanding. It’s a slow play, and the stage is enlivened particularly by Anthony Howell’s disillusioned Trigorin and Lily James’s luminous Nina. James’s Nina is a remarkable creation – she is extraordinarily expressive without being over the top, and follows a totally believable trajectory from giggly, coquettish ingenue in the first half to unhinged and hopeless in the second. Her burgeoning relationship with Howell’s Trigorin is a joy to watch. Emily Dabbs makes a wonderfully frustrated and miserable Masha, struggling to escape what is expected of her and to ignore her unrequited love. Matthew Kelly is a twinkling and avuncular Dorn, and Jospeh Drake’s twitchy and helpless Konstantin is extremely well-judged.

The piece feels startlingly modern, greatly helped by Reiss’s choice of language. Nina’s speech about how much she craves fame for its own sake could be spoken by a twenty-first century teenager watching The X Factor. The beauty of it is that rather than shoe-horning in contemporary references or making the modern parallels explicit, what Reiss and Bolam have achieved is to make it clear that Chekhov really is timeless.

The Seagull is at Southwark Playhouse until 1 December. For information and tickets visit www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk.