3rd Fact

FACT 3: Clive Owen met his wife Sarah-Jane Fenton at the Young Vic, when they performed the leads in Romeo and Juliet back in 1988.  It was one of Clive Owen’s first works after he graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

“The story is actually a little schmaltzy,” laughs Owen. “Basically, Sarah-Jane and I did Romeo and Juliet together not long after I’d left drama school. It was love at first sight for me, although I remember that I had to put in quite a lot of groundwork. I was instantly attracted to her, but had to work a little bit!”
(Clive Owen in an interview with The Daily Telegraph)

Did you miss FACT #1? FACT #2?

My memory of studying The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams for GCSE English Lit

I distinctly recall studying The Glass Menagerie as a “memory play” for my GCSE English Literature course ten years ago. My main concern back then as a 16 year-old school student was memorising key quotes like “You live in a dream: you manufacture illusions” and of course, making sure that there were always 2 N’s, 2 S’s and 4 E’s in Tennessee.

It was the first time I’d questioned why anyone would want to collect glass animals. I was never obsessed with things like that as a child, I was not even close to having an imaginary world like Laura Wingfield does, but I did recognise that there was a certain magic in the way that light could dance through cut glass.

Another fond memory was my English teacher trying her hardest to read the play out loud in her attempt at a southern drawl – you know, to help us really imagine the setting of the play in America’s Deep South. She had an air of being a fading Southern belle herself, but the South of England was hardly the same, and whilst we appreciated her efforts, her attempt at the accent didn’t help us much.

If I had been given the chance to see The Glass Menagerie performed on stage when I was studying it, there’s no doubt that it would have enhanced my understanding of the play and let’s face it, it would have been more fun! The Young Vic’s stage production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie will hopefully save thousands of English teachers the embarrassment of attempting a Southern drawl and The Glass Menagerie Script-writing Competition we have set up on Spinebreakers.co.uk will hopefully encourage teenagers across the UK to write their own plays inspired by family and in doing so, better understand what it was like for Tennessee Williams to write this play back in the 1940s about his own real life.

Danielle Innes, (competition judge and editor of Spinebreakers.co.uk)

The Glass Menagerie Script-Writing Competition runs until 31 Oct 2010 and is open to UK residents aged 13-18. Entry is on Spinebreakers.co.uk.

Exciting times with Fevered Sleep

Theo Peters (c) Keith Pattison

Exciting times with Fevered Sleep. On Ageing opened last night. My goodness it’s an incredible project to be involved with. From the first technical rehearsal last Thursday where the seven children (aged 7 to 13) were ‘on their own’ for the first time with no prompting from the directors, to a high energy dress rehearsal on Saturday night to the first preview last night – it’s a risky old process to be involved in. The children are amazing. Their commitment to the show is a wonder. And the most exciting thing as an audience member (although not necessarily for the creative team!) is that you never know what they are going to do next. I can’t wait to see it again. Every night will be different and every show will give me a new and different perspective on what it is to be a living, growing and ageing human being.

Louise Blackwell
Producer, Fuel

We love poetry magnets

Even more, we love it when Young Vic friends come up with great sentences with our 40th Anniversary Season poetry magnets!

@richard_fitch sends us his best sentence. We like it.

Want your own set of magnets? Follow @youngvictheatre on Twitter and maybe we’ll do another round of magnets soon for our weekly #TantalisingTuesdays competition!

Pet Shop Boys + David Almond = My Dad’s a Birdman

My Dad’s a Birdman, a show we originally staged in 2003 is returning this Christmas. Only this time, it’s bigger and better than ever!

That’s right! We have just confirmed that the world famous electronic duo Pet Shop Boys will be writing original music for it. It’s their first venture into a theatre project for young audiences and so we’re really looking forward to hearing what they will come up with. Plus David Almond’s just won this year’s Hans Christian Andersen Award, also perhaps better known as the ‘Nobel Prize for children’s literature’.

Not many people remember or are aware of this, but My Dad’s a Birdman actually originated as a play. It was later turned into the beautiful best-selling children’s book, which is what it’s more known as now. When Almond’s award-winning work Skellig was being staged in our Main House back in 2003, he used similar themes and wrote My Dad’s a Birdman for our younger audiences to be staged at the same time next door – in The Maria studio.

The story is really beautiful, dealing with love and loss in a way that younger children can understand. There’s a great synopsis and quick interview of David Almond on the Booktrust’s website.

Also launched today is the My Dad’s a Birdman Drawing Competition. Win an autographed copy of the beautiful book by David Almond (courtesy of the wonderful Walker Books) and a goody bag. Submit your drawings today (you have to be ten or under though)!

What do you do at the Young Vic?

Mark Bixter on producing 40 Years Young, which took place on September 12, 2010.

PART ONE
When people ask me “What do you do at the Young Vic?” I struggle to give them a succinct answer, since working here I have been known as box office assistant, usher, stage crew, finance assistant, project researcher, press assistant, box office duty manager, social networking person, cleaner, theatre officer, two boroughs assistant, balloon modeller and now it seems blogger! However in recent weeks I awarded myself with the title producer – nobody else called me this but I liked the sense of self importance it gave me so I kept up the pretence and this is the story of how it happened…

A few months back Lucy Woollatt the Executive Director at the Young Vic said “Mark – we’re planning an event to celebrate 40 years of the Young Vic would you be interested in helping put it together?” “Sure” I said “sounds good” “Great” said Lucy “We don’t know what it will be yet but I guess you’ll figure that out” and so the idea was born and with an insanely naive view of how big a task I had taken on the journey began.

A few weeks later I’m introduced to Chris White who will be the director we get on very well and start brainstorming – there is no shortage of ideas, but there is a shortage of time and money so we shelve our plans for a firework display, a fly past of the red arrows and a specially commissioned song to be performed by The Who and head to the theatre museum archive to trawl through 47 boxes of Young Vic history. We start at box one, we have two aims: 1 – to get a good overview of the history of the Young Vic, 2 – to find interesting materials for a display that will completely change the look of the front of house areas. After 8 hours we have got to box number 7 – I get my first glimpse of the enormity of the job.

Invitation to 40 Years Young

A couple of weeks later after 3 more days sat in the bowels of the theatre museum we finally reach box 47, we have 12 boxes of stuff and cart them back to the Young Vic. From our research we have a working knowledge of productions and staff from the past 40 years and begin to set plans in place. Aside from the front of house display we decide to interview as many people as possible who have worked at the Young Vic for a listening post, we will speak to all the artistic directors (Frank Dunlop, Michael Bogdanov, David Thacker, Tim Supple, Julia Bardsley and David Lan) and ask them what they feel defined their tenure and represent it in the main performance, we will include some work with young people, we will include some music from Young Vic shows, we will look at Shakespeare as there have been so many Shakespeare productions, we will have some new writing…  in short the event starts to take place.

Mark Bixter, Duty Box Office Manager (slash – producer, box office assistant, usher, stage crew, finance assistant, project researcher, press assistant, box office duty manager, social networking person, cleaner, theatre officer, two boroughs assistant, balloon modeller and blogger)

Happy 40th to us!

We started celebrating our 40th Anniversary this weekend, as we officially turned 40 last Friday! Thanks to everyone who’s been wishing us well – especially our friends on Facebook and Twitter. We are overwhelmed by everyone’s support.

BBC did a short piece on us yesterday – click here to watch it. And well done to everyone involved in The Human Comedy, especially the 80 members of the cast who come from the community of Lambeth and Southwark that we are… we are proud of you!

Check out the production photos…

Behind The Scenes on “The Human Comedy” at The Young Vic

I was asked to come into the Young Vic and film a rehearsal of The Human Comedy on the day that the cast had their first rehearsal on the Main Stage. This short films’ primary use was to go as part of a trio of shorts I shot (as part of the up and coming Media Lab) for The Young Vic on their 40 Years Young anniversary.

It was a very busy day as it was also The Cast and Community’s first day of Tech in amongst the set (designed by the ridiculously talented Jon Bausor). I found that I had very little work to do, there were so many things happening that all I had to do was point and shoot and 9/10 I caught something interesting. To add to the rehearsal footage, I interviewed the a-for mentioned Designer Jon, the actors Brenda Edwards and Terel Nugent, and members of the community choir; Ceilidh, Anthony, Kayode, Tyrel, Zoe and Cathy. The thing that struck me about them all is their excitement and passion of being involved in this production.

All in all I hope this video encapsulates one of the many things that make the Young Vic unique; its involvement with the local community, and its ability to make all who take part, feel like a star.

Adam Hipkin, Young Vic Youth Council

On Ageing – News From the Front Line!

(Written 4 September)

We’ve just finished our fifth week of rehearsals, and the show is finally beginning to reveal itself.  I never cease to be surprised by how bonkers devising is.  It’s a bit like looking for something in the dark, and not knowing what you’re looking for, and certainly not knowing where the light-switch is.  All you can do is hold tight, keep your eyes open and hope that you’ll see it coming, the show, the thing you’re looking for.

Now that we can see what On Ageing might be, it’s turning into a very exciting time, every day discovering new possibilities in the material, and new directions to explore, and digging deeper and finding more.

Watch this space – and who knows, by the 27th September we might actually have discovered the full magic of what this show wants to be…

David Harradine (Director of On Ageing)

Why children?

Why create a show about ageing, performed by children?
Director David Harradine explains…

On Ageing is not a piece about ‘being old’, it is a piece about ageing, and as such it is about something that everybody, whether they’re six or sixty or ninety, can relate to.

After talking with a lot of older people, the same idea kept emerging… people continue to feel young even as they become old and that gives us the image of having a younger person’s or even a child’s outlook on life, at the same time as living with an ageing body.

Fevered Sleep has made a lot of work for children, in which we’ve involved children in our creative processes.  We wanted to take this one step further, and see if it was possible to create a show using all our usual approaches and ideas, only working with children.

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