As the Dublin Youth Theatre celebrates its 25th anniversary, Derek O'Connor looks back at its highlights and the impressive line-up of actors, journalists and celebrities who passed through its doors.
To say that the 25th anniversary of Dublin Youth Theatre is a cause for celebration would be a massive understatement. The capital's ability to underappreciate its finest resource might mean that, by and large, day-to-day activities at 23 Gardiner Street tend to go largely unnoticed, but DYT's contribution to the arts in Ireland is a lasting and vital one.
Today, this linchpin of the Irish youth drama movement continues to act as a breeding ground for budding theatrical talent, both on and off the stage, an occasional production house for stimulating and innovative theatre and, perhaps most importantly, an essential outlet for the nascent creative impulses of a generation of young people. The hours have been put in, above and beyond the call of duty, and respect is long overdue.
While it's a testament to the rude health of the youth drama scene that the umbrella organisation, the National Association for Youth Drama, oversees activities for some 70 (and rising) groups nationwide, back in 1977 the story was a much simpler one: nothing was happening.
If you were interested in theatre back in the 1970s, says NAYD director Eilis Mullen, what you did was go to college and get involved with Dramsoc or Trinity Players, something you could try out while doing that BA or degree. "It might influence you to lean towards theatre as a career, or it might simply be for the craic," she adds.
But she says that Paddy O'Dwyer, a psychologist for the Department of Education (where he remains today) and then stalwart of the amateur drama scene had a vision beyond that. "\ point was: 'Why isn't there something like that for people who didn't get a chance to go to college?' That you could set up something outside of a school structure, not a training course to be an actor by any stretch of the imagination, but something you could try out, be creative with and have fun whilst doing. It was that simple.
"He then decided to stick his neck out and think big, to call it Dublin Youth Theatre (DYT), and everything went from there. It all comes from Paddy."
When O'Dwyer approached the Catholic Youth Council with a view to borrowing space for workshops, he began a journey that would ultimately lead the developing DYT to a disused, Jesuit-owed premises on Upper Gardiner Street. Starting off with a room in the basement, today DYT owns the building.
Indeed, while it would be oversimplifying matters to suggest youth drama in Ireland developed from there, DYT's bold leaps into the unknown served as a totem for a nascent network, one that accommodates thousands of teenagers and young adults around the country.
That Gardiner Street premises still plays host to a weekly Saturday workshop, and while over the years DYT has travelled worldwide, staging any number of impressive productions - an annual trip to the Project remains a fixture on their calendar - the house remains central to the most of Dublin Youth Theatre's activities. Over the years, it has doubled as a convenient venue for many events: its well-traversed hallways, maintained by irrepressible live-in caretaker Peter McLoughlin, exude the proud history of the place. For a few weeks each year, the second floor studio space is turned over to the members, offering them an opportunity to mount productions of their own work.
Says Veronica Coburn, founder-member of Barrabas: The Company and chairperson of the DYT board, "Increasingly, what I find incredibly important about DYT is that young people can do things \ that they can't do anywhere else. For me, the most eye-opening experience there over the last couple of years has been watching the ongoing development of the Member's One-Act Festival, and to see what the members have to say. Some of it I liked, some of it I didn't, some of it amazed and astounded me, even in terms of the subject matter being chosen at times. I suppose I think that it's interesting that, in a time when it seems that everyone's gabbing away all of the time, I'm not entirely sure that there's an awful lot of places where young people absolutely have complete freedom to have a voice. A lot of the time, it seems to me, they're busy towing party lines. DYT can still offer them an outlet for expression they don't get anywhere else."
Over the years it has commissioned original works from such disparate voices as Gerard Stembridge (later DYT's Artistic Director), Lee Dunne, Peter Sheridan, Mark O'Rowe and Anne Enright.
They've tackled everything in recent years from Brecht's agit-musical Happy End to a collaboration with self-styled multi-media art terrorists Desperate Optimists; a recent well-received Project production, provocative two-hander Some Kind Of Beautiful, was penned by 19-year-old DYT-er Aoife Courtney and nurtured through the in-house Script Development Programme.
Among the roll-call of former members, there are directors, writers, choreographers, technical staff, administrators, the odd television celebrity and Irish Times journalist. Familiar names include Disco Pigs author Enda Walsh, award-winning Guardian journalist Maggie O'Kane, Wanderlust's Brendan Courtney, Queer As Folk star Aiden Gillen. It's an intriguing list of wildly disparate talents. What the organisation has always been keen to stress, however, is that Dublin Youth Theatre is not - and never has been - an acting school.
"On the most basic level, I always think of DYT as being a place of possibility," says Veronica Coburn. "In practical terms, its legacy can be found all over the place, in terms of people, and in a broader sense - getting very high-minded altogether - that legacy lasts in any number of rounded people, ones who came through it and found something from the experience.
"People who might otherwise have been lost; maybe through DYT they found a place that was more comfortable for them, one that allowed them to figure out who they were.
"Then there's the legacy in terms of youth theatre, which is huge, too: what's happening now is that the distance between people leaving and then coming back - as leaders, as interested parties - is getting shorter. The time and energy invested is phenomenal."
With a new artistic director, Calypso's Mojisola Adebayo, on board, DYT has chosen to spend its anniversary looking forward. Youth arts were never the most subsidised of sectors, but while you won't hear much by way of grumbling from management about Dublin Youth Theatre's funding scenarios, the general feeling is that, if expansion lies ahead, there's still a lot of work to be done.
A quarter century down the road, there's as much youthful joie de vivre to be channelled as ever. "Working with young people on a show," offers Eilis Mullen, "particularly a DYT show, is an experience, every single time. They might drive you mad, miss the odd rehearsal and all that, but in the end they always pull out all the stops. You come up with an idea, they give it 150 per cent. And you don't get that from adults. Then they move on, and you think 'Oh, this was the greatest bunch ever'.
"They go, whether it's to a job in the bank or the movies or whatever, and then the next lot come up and do the same thing again. Always with that enthusiasm, often hidden by an apparent casualness," she laughs. "It's unique."
For further information on Dublin Youth Theatre, phone (01) 874 3687. Further information on youth theatres countrywide, from the National Association for Youth Drama at (01) 878 1301 or www.youthdrama.ie
