When I meet Simon Stephens he is in the middle of taking over the National Theatre’s (NT) Twitter account for an hour of #askaplaywright. He is running his hands through his hair whilst rapidly dictating answers to a scribe for the occasion. He is ebullient and engaged, and exactly how you’d imagine a writer to be.

“Whatever your job is, do your bloody job,” is one of the best gems of advice he offers me. A Northerner by birth he holds “no truck with not working… what annoys me almost more than ineptitude in anything is laziness”. An hour talking to him will dispel anybody’s impression that to be a writer is not a real job, and if you examine his oeuvre you will know that he is anything but lazy. This is a man who clearly understands what it is to be a writer. He is curious about the world and what it is to be human, and our conversation covers everything from his writing process to men’s toilet behaviour.

A men’s toilet is normally “very functional and very quiet”. In the interval of a performance of his play Port at Manchester’s Royal Exchange in 2002 the opposite was the case, this toilet was “full of people talking to each other” and what they were saying wasn’t good. Stephens’ work has always provoked discussion, and you may know him from last year’s Morning at The Traverse, Three Kingdoms at the Lyric or his adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time at the NT. Port is now being revived at the NT and I wonder whether it will provoke the same response as the cited 2002 performance, where one elderly audience member proclaimed “my husband lived through the war and that play was worse”.

Apparently “the play gave old people a bad name”, a comment to which Stephens comes back with the statement that “what they don’t realise is life is like that”. His plays are always about starkly real situations, even with expressionistic work such as Three Kingdoms, they “are plays that have fundamentally operated on a kind of psycho realist level”. Recent work has often been seen as very dark and lacking in hope; Port on the other hand is remarkably hopeful and has made Stephens wonder if he needs to regain his optimism. The experience of returning to Port after so many years has been, as he stated on Twitter: “Inspiring. Melancholy. Odd. Exciting.”

Place is very present in Stephens’s work and Port is “a story about a girl growing up and leaving Stockport” which is his hometown. “We see her from the age of 11 to the age of 23 with one apparently small scene played out every two years. The accumulated minutiae of her life gives her her life story of that age”. When asked about this importance of place Stephens responds with the following: “being human carries out on two particular axes. The axis of time is fundamental to the dramatist because it carries with us everything we remember and everything that we anticipate or want, and drama comes out of desire… but the characterstic of space is also very important, we define our sense of self in relation to where we are.”

Stephens is keen to impress, however, that Port isn’t an autobiographical play. Quoting one of his major influences, Sarah Kane, he explains that drama comes from “lived experience, observed experience and researched experience, and on some level you need all three”. There is as much of himself in Three Kingdoms as there is in Port. What he does acknowledge is that with every artist’s work there will be shared obsessions, returned to time and again, spanning all of their output even when every piece of work is extremely different. Stephens admires this in the work of artist Gehard Richter, saying that nothing has inspired him more in recent years than the Tate Modern retrospective of Richter’s work. He has a catalogue from this exhibition that he looks at every morning “just as a reminder of what an artist can be”.

Stephens is also inspired by music, and the musical landscape of 1980s Manchester played an important part in the creation of Port. “I would like my plays to inspire, excite, terrify and alarm audiences in the same way and with the same directness as music does to me”. This seems a fresh and youthful approach, but when questioned about writing plays to appeal to young audiences Stephens answers he doesn’t tend to write with any specific audience in mind: “normally I write for myself and anybody who likes it is a remarkable coincidence”. It’s in this way that the personal seeps into his work, and obsessions that he has spotted cropping up in his work with “tremendous repetition” are questions of “home and honesty”. Whilst we are talking Stephens realises that a new play he is working on “is the first play I’ve ever written that’s about coming home”. This, he puts down to where he is now in his life – married with children and a “sense of security and certainty” as opposed to a restlessness that abounded in his 20s.

I ask Stephens about his writing process; he writes on Word, on a computer with the Internet “looming and waiting for procrastination”. Procrastination is, he says, a useful tool and part of the “mulling process”. How does he procrastinate? By going on the Man United website or by doing “very old fashioned things like reading books”. He describes his process as “mulling, crystalising, writing”. The writing always comes last and “can be a matter of weeks or days even”.

Stephens is full of words of advice for writers, one of the best of which he took from Stephen Jeffreys which is this: “before you read it, print it, with a title page and look at it”. He follows this up by reminding me that not many people can say they’ve written a play; “to have written a play you’re in the top 3% of the world population and it’s worth being fucking proud of”. This is possibly the best piece of advice a young playwright could ever hear.

The National Theatre have created a storify of Simon Stephens’s Twitter takeover; you can view it at http://storify.com/Nationaltheatre/askaplaywright-simon-stephens.

Port plays at the National Theatre Lyttleton until 24 March 2013. For tickets and more information, click here: http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/port

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.

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

Three Kingdoms at Lyric Hammersmith

At the very end of King Lear (by that Shakespeare bloke) there is a spectacular snippet of verse that includes the line “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say”. If ever you could encapsulate a mantra for creating theatre then the Bard did it with that very simple piece of advice, but how readily can it be put into practice? Why SHOULD we be creating theatre?

A few weeks ago the question of “why are we doing what we’re doing?” came up in our current rehearsal process. Many of us had been to see Three Kingdoms and observed the reaction it caused in the theatrical community, with some even suggesting it could be the shape of British theatre to come. It was during this time that Vicky Featherstone was appointed as new Artistic Director of the Royal Court. With Featherstone’s reputation for stylised work, all signs seem to be indicating that the Court might be heading in a very particular direction.

This raised an interesting question for us as a company because of the work we’ve decided to create. From the beginning it was clear that we would be dedicated to staging works of realism. We knew we wanted to be a company grounded in the idea that “everything should be as in real life” (Anton Chekhov). As the company’s Artistic Director, this is what I have always believed in. I remember witnessing the works of Chekhov, Ibsen and O’Neil for the first time, and being mesmerised by the idea that someone would actually dare put such things on stage, work so bitterly real and uncompromising in its reality of human existence. However, with parts of the industry seemingly going in one direction (or yearning to do so), the question was raised as to whether we should follow our convictions or follow the crowd?

Of course, because we’re such an impudent bunch, we quickly said “fuck that” to the latter and carried on jauntily treading our selected path, but I do believe it’s easy to find yourself following the trends. It is tempting to make theatre just to please an audience or to make the right moves in an attempt to be ‘successful’.

Dennis Kelly recently questioned if such ambition was a bad thing or was in any way wrong. I’m here to suggest that it is. It is wrong because it deprives the audience of any risk; it deprives people of the heart and guts that make theatre. Without risk, without people doing what they truly want to do, we would never have had some of the arts’ greatest creations. We would never have had Waiting For Godot. Imagine that.

I believe there is also another damaging direction that theatre makers can be forced to follow: the pointless pursuit of originality.

Every submissions list that I can think of includes some variation of that ensnaring word: original. Each institution insists on “innovation” or “re-examination”, but what do they mean? Do our theatrical institutions expect us to create something unusual or provocative just to be original? What if we believe in something that, to their subjective eye, isn’t different? Should we give up now because we don’t want to “piss on the grave of the theatrical rule book”?

I say, forget that word, bury it, ignore it. Don’t try to be original or do something different. Do whatever you want to do because it excites you, because it grabs you in the gut and keeps you awake at night, because when you think about it you can’t stand still, you have to get up and move because it’s driving you forward, because the blood in your veins is moving that much more swiftly. Who cares if someone is already doing what you’re doing? Why not do to it better?

The preoccupation we have with originality is unnecessary and ultimately damaging. We shouldn’t be creating work to be original. We should just create work from our soul, the very core of our being and I can guarantee you that it will be original. It will be different without you even trying.

One of my drama school teachers – the effervescent Katya Benjamin – once said that “your gift is your own individuality”. What I took from that is that if you’re true to yourself, what you bring to the table is always going to be different, so how about we don’t worry about that word? Let’s discard it. Instead we should encourage theatre makers to do what they want, not what we think they should do.

I believe it is time to speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

It is time to act first to desire your own good opinion.

It is time to stand up and be brave.

Written by artistic director Ash Rowbin.

Tickets for Shelter, the company’s first production, are now on sale at the Tristan Bates Theatre website or by phone on 020 7240 6283. Performances from 6 – 11 August.