The NT Shell Connections youth theatre workshops in Cork are a powerhouse of energy and original thinking, reports Belinda McKeon
I've been reading about the Everyman Palace Studio, based in Cork's Everyman Palace Theatre, for months now, so it's strange to finally come face to face with it in the flesh. Its physical embodiment is the Kevin Andersen Room in the Everyman, a bright, open space perhaps most kindly described as possessing a shabby gentility. Layers of ancient wallpaper set off chequered floorboards piled with the dust of the years. But there's a huge window, and plenty of room for experiment; after the directors of the Studio, Thomas Conway and Oonagh Kearney, have renovated it, this room should be perfect for their purpose.
Last week, it became the location of a series of workshops taking place as part of NT Shell Connections, a major festival of youth theatre which runs in several venues across the UK and Ireland from March until July's national festival. With the Everyman chosen to host this year's Irish festival, youth theatre groups from around the country arrived to stage their productions of brand new plays by major names. But before the performance comes the warm-up, and afterwards the post-mortem, and it's in this room that these elements of the theatrical experience come into focus.
Twice a day here, Conway takes a different set of young performers and puts them through a rigorous hour or so of vocal exercises. It's here, too, that the four theatre critics who have been invited to take part in the festival indulge in their own vocal aerobics as they discuss the task of theatre reviewing with groups of students from local secondary schools.
I'm one of the critics, and as the hour of my encounter with the students of Nagle Rice, St Patrick's, Regina Mundi, Douglas Community College and St Angela's approaches, I make my way to the small corridor outside the Kevin Andersen Room, where Conway is leading one of his vocal workshops. The open door frames a symphony of swinging arms, of chanting breaths; a short, sharp sound travels in a circle from one participant to the next. This is Conway's demonstration of what he calls "giving" onstage - passing the voice so that the flow of projection to one another, and to the audience, is sustained throughout a performance. He teaches them the way to breathe so that their voices reach their strongest pitch onstage - not just from the shoulders or the chest, he warns, but from the abdomen. Released, the communal intake of breath becomes a deep hum that fills the room and sounds, from outside, like a small plane.
"Work on that emotion, that friction in your body that you need to produce that sound," Conway tells them. "Experiment with the pitch; this is a private thing, this hum. Check with yourself that it feels right, then quote a line from a play to yourself, to see if you're connecting with your voice."
The hum becomes a cacophony as each participant chooses a line; there are Hamlets in there, and Juliets; Nora Clitheroes, and Willy Lomans. But most of all, there are characters from tonight's two plays - the doomed young couple and the angry father of Judith Johnson's The Willow Pattern, a dramatisation of the ancient Chinese legend behind those blue-and-white plates, or the uptight conductor and the leather-trousered janitor of Patrick Marber's The Musicians. These young actors have worked for more than six months to bring these plays to the Everyman auditorium - a vast, booming place compared with the performance spaces they've worked in - and they don't want a single word to be lost on their audience. With four hours to showtime, this small room is throbbing with energy.
But then, youth theatre in Ireland is just that - a powerhouse of energy - according to Peter Hussey, of the Co Kildare-based theatre company, Crooked House, who works as a director with Kildare Youth Theatre and has come here, along with Karina Power and Darren Donohue, to direct a number of productions over the five days.
"Youth theatre is huge here, compared even with Britain," Hussey says. "It's phenomenal really, when you think about it - almost every county has one or two, which is upwards of 70 in the whole country."
The youth of the performers, he maintains, can impart a power to productions which is often lacking on more mature stages.
"Two of our first-years, Joe Byrne and Orla Kelly, are just 15 and 13, and they played Romeo and Juliet in our big show last year," he says. "It was extraordinary. Because they were the age of the characters. Here was all of this stuff, and it was deeply shocking, and they gave it such commitment. And you thought, Jesus, here are these kids having sex at 13, poisoning each other, killing themselves. We had to do very little with them; just their very young age brought that out."
And that night, onstage in The Willow Pattern, Byrne and Kelly, like the other performers, seem older than their years. There is nervousness, and an over-reliance on guaranteed laughs - which comes in for censure by the students in the next morning's criticism workshop. Yet there is a strong sense, too, that these performers are dedicated to their craft, that the stage is a place where they intend to stay. Young as they may be, they are professionals. Likewise, in another production of The Musicians by Newbridge Integrated College, Banbridge, Co Down, the actors know how to use a stage, how to move together, how to achieve a lasting impact as a group. The penultimate scene, in which Tchaikovsky's fourth symphony is performed by an empty-handed orchestra, ignites an excitement and a wonder in the auditorium which is a rare enough experience.
However, Donohue and Hussey agree that youth theatre is not generally taken seriously here, no matter how professional the productions, by audiences, theatre companies or critics. A festival such as this one, they say, provides vital encouragement and focus to the efforts of youth theatre groups. Running for 11 years now (Shell has been a sponsor since 2002), the festival's strength unquestionably lies in the quality of its programme - these are largely new plays by major international writers, written with youthful performers and audiences in mind. With the Everyman hosting the Irish proceedings, there are 15 additional festivals taking place across the UK. In all, more than 200 schools and youth theatre companies are involved. From a portfolio of plays - in there is new work by Bryony Lavery, Simon Armitage, and Philip Ridley - each participating company is encouraged to produce the one with which it feels the greatest connection.
Which is why, in the Everyman, there are three different productions of The Musicians and two of Boat Memory, Laline Paull's exploration of post-colonial identity. But the overlap is not a problem, insists Andrea Grimason, director of Newbridge's The Musicians, which catapults young Winston Weir to pin-up status after his Thursday night performance as Alex, the blissfully camp, Pinball Wizard-loving janitor ("My god, that kid has charisma," one hardened theatre critic is heard to mutter).
"Some of our group went last night, to the other production of The Musicians, and it has been really good for them, in terms of their being able to be critical about theatre," says Grimason. "They saw a totally different director's approach to the piece, so it's great for them to see what you can do with a text, where the personal vision comes in, where it's possible to override rules and everything. They were able to discuss it with me, and talk about what they thought worked for them, and what didn't. And that validated the choices they had made."
Grimason's job as a director, she says, is to ward off any danger of performers being overtly influenced by other interpretations of their part.
Out of all the productions which are staged at the Everyman during the festival, the Cork School of Music production of Boat Memory attracts perhaps the greatest pre-performance attention, not only because of local interest but because it has been selected to go forward from this regional festival to the national festival - it will play at the Olivier Theatre on July 12th. The performers are understandably excited at the prospect, according to Trina Scott, who directed the production along with Regina Crowley. But perhaps even more exciting was the experience of meeting the writer, Laline Paull, who attended the Wednesday night performance.
"That was a huge kick for them," says Scott. "To get her feedback. She loved the production, thought it was very stylish, liked the way they worked as an ensemble. And had some suggestions. She is coming over again in June to rehearse with the group."
But Paull may have her work cut out when she returns next month to oversee the London-bound Boat Memory. In my criticism workshop, the day after the Cork School of Music production, one of that group's young performers is present. Up for discussion are the different ingredients that go into making a theatre review and into making a play, and the gap of understanding which can open between the two. The relationship between the author's intention, the director's vision, and the actor's realisation is, all agree, a delicate one. And it's one, the young Cork performer-cum-critic suggests, in which the intention of the author might often have to be superseded for the sake of the production - just one example, from the two-day workshop, of the discernment and intelligence of this group of young critics. Like their peers onstage, they felt able to question the whole endeavour of the festival, to challenge its structures, even as they enjoyed its creativity, its humour, its social side.
A play such as The Musicians may be hugely entertaining, says Ian, another young critic, and the cast were great, "but the story was unbelievable, and it was all about the laughs. And it's either that side, in the plays, and in Irish TV, or it's the other - all dark subjects, and moralism. There is no in between, nothing normal, nothing really for us, about us".
In a country where writing which addresses the concerns of teenagers is virtually non-existent, could there be issued a juicier challenge?