Spotlight heads to London

Scottish group chosen to perform at the National Theatre

 

Last year (2023), Spotlights Community Youth Theatre applied to take part in the National Theatre Connections Festival 2024. And we never imagined the crazy adventure that would ensue as a result.

Connections is the National Theatre’s annual nationwide youth theatre festival. The programme is 30 years old and has a history of championing the talent of young people from across the UK. Every year, they commission ten new plays written for young people and over 250 schools and youth theatres participate. Each group take on one play, which they perform at home, then at their ‘partner theatre’. The National Theatre send a mentor director to see the home show and meet with the cast to make suggestions and recommendations for transferring the show to the partner theatre.

We were given a rare musical as we are a society that performs musical theatre as well as ‘straight’ plays. The Sad Club, by Luke Barnes and Adam Pleeth, is a series of monologues, duologues and catchy songs about young people and their mental health. It covers issues such as trying to fit in with peers, depression, school and parental pressures, peer pressure, risky behaviour and young people putting on a front to the world while internally hurting and struggling. This show resonated with our young members and they embraced it enthusiastically. Our director was a bit apprehensive though, trying to figure out how to quickly shift scenes from a swimming pool to outer space, to Australia, to 1400’s Greenland, to Medieval England to a contemporary house party, etc. There were over 20 scene changes in a 55-minute show! Luckily, as part of the festival, directors must attend a training weekend in London provided by the National Theatre. While there, our director met other groups doing the same show, as well as professional directors and theatre makers and was able to find sparks of inspiration.

The defining moment was when she realised she wasn’t interested in creating a movement piece for the crucial swimming pool scene. Instead, a paddling pool and water represented it!! On returning from London, she shared the idea with the cast, and they loved it. From there, spotlights built a show that did not take itself seriously and planned to alienate the audience at every opportunity.

The show opened with the cast setting up props and the 12 chairs that made up their set, handing out business cards saying, ‘Welcome to the Sad Club’ and asking audience members to hold a paddling pool. The opening song ‘Here We Are We Are So Happy’ ended with the cast holding their ending positions an uncomfortably long time. The cast regularly directed their lines to individual members of the audience, sometimes even sitting next to them and putting an arm round them and the show ended without any walkdown or play-off, the cast just walked into the audience.

The home performances in March, were a great success with fantastic audience feedback. The mentor director gave a helpful feedback report, which inspired a few things to work on before performing in Pitlochry Festival Theatre in April. In Pitlochry, Spotlights attended workshops with the other groups that were taking part, as well as running the tech/dress rehearsal. Spotlights show opened the weekend of shows and it was an amazing experience performing in a professional theatre, supported by people who work in theatre. We were able to watch the other performances too, and it was interesting to see what the other groups had done with their scripts, all of which were very different to ours.

And that was that! We put away our Sad Club jackets, binned the leftover business cards and started looking towards our next show.

And then, in May, our director got a phone call. It was the Connections Team in London…

“We’d like to invite your group to come to London to perform at the National Theatre!”

To explain, as part of the Connections Festival, groups film their home performance and send it to the Connections Team. They also film the performances at the partner theatre and all the performances are watched by the team and mentor directors who select one group for each of the ten plays to go to London and perform their play. The choices are made for a variety of reasons, and it’s not a competition, but it means they thought your production was a worthwhile version of the play and worthy of being on a London stage.

Our director repeatedly said in the run-up to our performances to the cast, crew and anyone who would listen, ‘We will not be going to London’. So when she got that phone call, she was so shocked she had to pull her car over to collect herself. So began a whirlwind of rounding up the cast, completing endless forms, organising rehearsals and general low-key panic.

As we were not allowed to bring our adult band, due to only young people being allowed to perform, Colin Grant, our MD, recorded the show’s music and we were able to start rehearsing with the recordings. Some of our cast were unable to come to London, so we had to recast those parts and teach those people the whole show. The National Theatre Connections Team provided a professional director, Joseph Hancock, to help us prepare for the London performance, and he was amazing. He joined us at three rehearsals and supported our director throughout the run-up to the show. He helped us argue for the cast to have radio mics, he helped us figure out how to adapt from a theatre where the audience was beside us to a theatre where the cast was on a raised stage, plus he listened to our director’s ideas and enabled her to conceive even more crazy ideas and transfer them to reality. The most radical idea was for the cast to have no bows but instead suddenly vanish, leaving the audience unsure if the show had ended. The cast was amazing and loved the idea. We decided the cast would vanish at the end and when the audience started to leave, would suddenly come back on to have a party and clear the stage, telling the audience to ‘go home’.

The week before the London show, our director and tech team travelled to London for a ‘dry tech’ without the cast. What an experience! We had a 4-hour tech and were met by so many people for lights, sound, props, costumes, stage management etc. There were even people just to stand on stage and have lights pointed at them. One of our team was a 14-year-old, who ran the mics for the show, and the sound team were amazing, showing them respect and empowering them to run the mics on this much bigger stage. Our director’s most memorable moment at that dry tech was when she was asked if she wanted a confetti cannon at the end, she replied “Yes, if it wasn’t too much bother,” and they said she couldn’t have it right now, but if she waited 20 minutes it would be ready to go! She was fully expecting them to say she had to wait a week!

The day the school summer holidays started, Spotlights were all up early to catch the 9am train to London! It was a long trip, over 6 hours, then travelling across London to Embankment, where we were staying. We arrived at our rooms at about 4pm and immediately left again to get tea before going to the National Theatre to watch two of the other Connections shows. Well, after watching two amazing productions by other companies, we knew that we had to bring our A-game.

The next day, we gathered at 8am, only to discover that two of our cast had, of course, forgotten a key piece of costume – even after all being texted the night before leaving, to make sure they had everything! But all was ok, as the National Theatre was able to source replacements. What a day that turned out to be. On arrival, we were given the health and safety talk before being taken to a rehearsal room to get to grips with any changes we needed or nerves we had to settle. We were given certain props that we had been able to request, including two Elizabethan neck ruffs they had borrowed from the Royal Shakespeare Company! A real step up from the ones we had made from curtain tape…

Despite having two hours in the rehearsal space, by the time we were settled, we only had the chance to run key scenes that had had cast changes before we were off for a tour of the theatre. After lunch, it was time for dress rehearsal on the actual stage! It went smoothly, all things considered, with the professionals simply fixing light and sound issues as we went. The young cast looked unfazed as we ran through all the scenes and songs, it was as if this was just another Spotlights show in Forfar.

After a light tea, it was showtime. The cast and crew all gathered one last time for a warm-up, and then it was time for everyone to take their places. Our director and mascot (10-year-old Rowan) took their seats in the auditorium. For our director, this was the first time seeing the show from the audience, as she had been the prompt for all other performances. The lights went down, and the show began. According to our director, she has never been more proud than she was watching Spotlights young people performing on the National Theatre stage. They brought energy, enthusiasm, commitment and professionalism to that stage while still keeping the Spotlights character of the show. The audience laughed, sympathised, were alienated and wrong-footed throughout the show. And we were pleased that we had been able to bring a bit of Scottish humour to London. Afterwards, we discovered the playwright and composer of the show were in the audience and they met with us after the show to tell us what they thought (they loved it) and to allow us to ask any questions.

The entire experience was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and our director hasn’t shut up about it since. The young people learned so much working with professionals at the National Theatre. The Connections Team were incredible at looking after us and making it the experience it was. We are now in rehearsal for next year’s Connections Festival, where we will be performing the play Fresh Air by Vickie Donoghue. We really hope you come and see us either in Forfar in March or Pitlochry in April.