National Theatre Connections 2021: 11 Plays for Young People

Miriam Battye is a writer from Manchester.? She was the first Sister Pictures Writer in Residence in 2018 and has various original ideas in development for television. Theatre includes: Trip the Light Fantastic (Bristol Old Vic); All Your Gold (Theatre Royal, Plymouth); Electricity (NYT/Arcola); Balance (Royal Exchange, Manchester); Pancake Day (Bunker/PLAY). Justine Themen (Director) is a theatre director and change-maker. She is currently Deputy Artistic Director of the Belgrade Theatre and Co-Artistic Director for its City of Culture 2021 programme. During her time at the Belgrade, she has built a small participatory programme into a broad-reaching ethos across the work of the building. The programme provides access to arts activity to some of the city's least arts-engaged communities, shapes talent development opportunities that strongly promote diversity across the sector and creates new work for the theatre’s stages. Her co-created work includes Rise (Belgrade Young Company), Walk for Your Life (Belgrade Black Youth Theatre), Hussan and Harry (Belgrade Youth Theatre with Coventry Refugee Centre); and The First Time I Saw Snow (Belgrade Theatre). Directing work focuses on new work from female writers of colour - Red Snapper (Liz Mytton), Under the Umbrella (Amy Ng), both Belgrade Theatre. She played a key role in Coventry winning its bid to become UK City of Culture 2021, and is Co-Director of its Signature Event. She is also a Clore Fellow (2012-13). Prior to working at the Belgrade, she worked for 6 years in Senegal & Suriname co-creating theatre (Hia Maun, Stiching Botopasi) & documentaries (Abigail, VPRO) and using the Arts as a tool in Development & Cultural Diplomacy. Claire Procter (Co-Director) is the Belgrade Theatre’s Creative Producer for Education. She has over 20 years of experience working with children and young people, both as a class teacher and theatre practitioner. Prior to joining the Belgrade, Claire worked for renowned Theatre-in-Education (TiE) company, Big Brum. She has written and co-created a number of original plays for and with young people, including The Impossible Language of the Time (Belgrade Youth Theatre/ Chris O’Connell), Room to Grow (Belgrade TiE) and On the Line (Belgrade Youth Theatre/ Jennifer Farmer). Her work to integrate TIE methodology into the making of the Belgrade’s youth theatre work has been central to the development of the Theatre’s participatory practise. Liz Mytton (Wordsmith) is a playwright and poet based in the North West. She took part in the Critical Mass writing programme at the Belgrade Theatre in 2014, which led to the production of her first full-length play,?Red Snapper, a runner up for the 2016 Alfred Fagon Audience Award. In 2018 as a Bristol Old Vic Open Session writer, Liz wrote Across the River, about Marcus Garvey and the KKK, which featured in Bristol Ferment Fortnight. Liz has also developed a piece of work exploring hate crime,?Southside Stories, which premiered at the Tobacco Factory in February 2019, and recently her own musical project, Shame Shanties, which uses seas shanties to explore women’s mental health. Liz regularly works as a writer and lyricist with Talking Birds Theatre Company in Coventry, most recently on a commission for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. She has worked with the Belgrade’s Young Company on two occasions in the role of wordsmith – firstly on Rise in 2017, and again in 2020 on Like There’s No Tomorrow. The Belgrade Young Company was established to give young people showing particular talent/ ability from across the Belgrade’s participatory programme an opportunity to grow their skills and abilities in a semi-professional context. Past work has included Frank Wedekind’s youth classic, Spring Awakening, rarely performed by young people of the same age as the characters; a physical production of The Tempest with Frantic Assembly; and Rise, co-created with a company of 10 young women aged 13 to 23 about their experiences of discrimination and rising beyond it. Mojisola Adebayo is a playwright, performer, director, producer, workshop facilitator and lecturer. She has a BA in Drama and Theatre Arts, an MA in Physical Theatre and her PhD is entitled Afriquia Theatre: Creating Black Queer Ubuntu Through Performance (Goldsmiths, Royal Holloway and Queen Mary, University of London). Mojisola trained extensively with Augusto Boal and is an international specialist in Theatre of the Oppressed, often working in locations of crisis and conflict. She has worked in theatre, radio and television, on four continents, over the past 25 years, performing in over 50 productions, writing, devising and directing over 30 plays, and leading countless workshops, from Antarctica to Zimbabwe. Her own authored plays include Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey (Lyric Hammersmith and Ovalhouse, London), Muhammad Ali and Me (Ovalhouse, Albany Theatre, London and UK touring), 48 Minutes for Palestine (Ashtar Theatre and international touring), Desert Boy (Albany Theatre, London and UK touring), The Listeners (Pegasus Theatre, Oxford), I Stand Corrected (Artscape, Ovalhouse, London and international touring) and The Interrogation of Sandra Bland (Bush Theatre, London). Alison Carr is a playwright and radio dramatist. Her plays include: The Last Quiz Night on Earth (Box of Tricks, UK tour, 2020); Caterpillar (shortlisted for the Theatre503 Playwriting Award 2016; premiered at Theatre503, London, 2018) and Iris (Live Theatre, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2016; winner of the Journal Culture Awards 2017 Writer of the Year). Hattie Naylor has won several national and international awards for her plays, and has much of her work broadcast on BBC Radio, including Mathilde, Solaris, The Making of Ivan the Terrible, Ivan and the Dogs (Tinniswood Award for Best Original Radio Drama in 2009), and Clarissa. The stage version of Ivan and the Dogs was nominated in the 2010 Olivier Awards for Outstanding Achievement. Theatre and opera work include Going Dark, Mother Savage, the opera Odysseus Unwound, The Nutcracker, Ben Hur, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Samuel Pepys' Diaries, Piccard in Space, and The Dark Art of Forgetting. Andrew Muir is a critically acclaimed writer for stage and screen with works including Double Sentence and Gold Dust (Deafinitely Theatre/Soho Theatre) and the short film A Family Man. He is the Literary Associate for Deafinitely Theatre for whom he adapted Love's Labours Lost as part of the London 2012 Festival at Shakespeare’s Globe. His short radio play The Perfect Non Starter was broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb in 2014. He also lectures at Bournemouth and Poole College. Frances Poet is a Glasgow-based writer. Her stage work includes Gut (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 2018); Adam (National Theatre of Scotland at the Traverse Theatre, 2017); Faith Fall (Òran Mór and Bristol's Tobacco Factory, 2012) and What Put the Blood (Abbey Theatre, 2017). She has also written a number of free adaptations including Strindberg's Dance of Death (Citizens Theatre, 2016) and Molière's The Misanthrope (Òran Mór, 2014).  Silva Semerciyan is a native of Michigan and she moved to the UK in 1998. While at university, she wrote Another Man’s Son which won the William Saroyan Prize for Playwriting. Silva Semerciyan's play Gather Ye Rosebuds won the Best New Play award at the Brighton Fringe Festival in 2013. She holds a BA in English from the University of Michigan and an MPhil in Playwriting from the University of Birmingham. She currently lectures in Drama and English in Bristol and is on attachment to the National Theatre Studio. Chris is currently under commission at the Royal Court Theatre, the National Theatre and the Bush Theatre. He was the Channel 4 Playwright in Residence at the Finborough Theatre (formerly the Pearson Playwright’s Scheme) in 2014. In his previous career as a social worker, he worked with young people in sexual health, child protection and with young offenders.

National Theatre Connections 2020
1. Introduction to National Theatre Connections
2. Wind / Rush Generation(s) by Mojisola Adebayo
3. Directors Notes on The Changing Room by Chris Bush
4. Tuesday by Alison Carr
5. A series of public apologies (in response to an unfortunate incident in the school lavatories) by John Donnelly
6. THE IT by Vivienne Franzmann
7. The Marxist in Heaven by Hattie Naylor
8. Look Up by Andrew Muir
9. Crusaders by Frances Poet
10. Witches Can’t Be Burned by Silva Semerciyan
11. Dungeness by Chris Thompson

Directors notes follow each of the 10 plays.

National Theatre Connections 2021
1. Introduction to the 2021 Collection
2. Directors Notes to Find a Partner by Miriam Battye
3. Find a Partner by Miriam Battye
4. Directors Notes to Like There’s No Tomorrow, created by the Belgrade Young Company with Justine Themen, Claire Procter and Liz Mytton
5. Like There’s No Tomorrow, created by the Belgrade Young Company with Justine Themen, Claire Procter and Liz Mytton