Audition for The Suit Parallel Production

Are you aged 15-22?
Would you like to perform in a professionally produced show at the Young Vic?

BE A PART OF IT!
The Suit Parallel Production

Auditions: Saturday 24th March

Rehearsal Dates: Monday 2nd April- Thurs 7th June

Performances: Fri 8th & Saturday 9th June

The production will give you the opportunity to:

• Work with a professional director and design team.
• Have a taste of how professional actors work.
• Perform in a production at the Young Vic to an invited audience.

What we are looking for:

• Creative young people who want to expand their understanding and knowledge of the theatre.
• Fun, committed and enthusiastic young people who enjoy performing

To apply or find out more, please  email sharonkanolik@youngvic.org

Please note that the project is only open to young people who either live or study in Lambeth or Southwark!

We are looking for young people age 15—22 to audition for The Suit, a contemporary play with music, directed by professional theatre director Suba Das.

No acting experience is necessary and the auditions will be informal drama workshops that you don’t need to prepare for!

A Parallel Production at the Young Vic

Be a part of Wild Swans

Do you want to perform in an epic production at the Young Vic?

We are looking for people of Chinese and East Asian heritage to be part of the community chorus that will join our professional cast each night in our 2012 production of Wild Swans.

You do not need any experience of performing – you just need to be enthusiastic, 18 years or over and absolutely committed to the rehearsal and performance schedule. Friendly and fun workshop auditions take place on 5 & 6 January 2012. Rehearsals will then take place in January and March/April and performances will take place from 13 April – 13 May.

To find out more about Wild Swans and to book your audition place, call the Young Vic on 020 7922 2845 or email wildswans@youngvic.org.

We hope to see you at the auditions!

Hamlet Resource Pack: Ten Facts About Hamlet

Hamlet Resource Pack: Ten Facts About Hamlet

Welcome to the Resource Pack for Hamlet which runs at the Young Vic Theatre from 28 October 2011 to 21 January 2012. Resource packs are created for the majority of Young Vic shows, to provide an insight into the plays we produce and how we produce them. Please check back for interviews with the cast and creative team.

The Hamlet resource pack has been written by Lootie Johansen-Bibby.

Enjoy!
Taking Part Department

______________________________________________________

TEN FACTS ABOUT HAMLET

1.  Hamlet is the most widely performed play in the world.  It is estimated that it is being performed somewhere every single minute of every day.

2. Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play and uncut would take between 4 and 5 hours to perform. Hamlet has 1530 lines, the most of any character in Shakespeare.

3. One of the earliest re-mounts of Hamlet was on board a ship called The Dragon, anchored of the coast of Sierra Leone in 1607.

4. It is believed that Shakespeare appeared in the play as the Ghost at the Globe.

5. In the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of Hamlet in 2009, David Tennant used a real skull as a prop in the gravedigger scene. The skull had belonged to the composer André Tchaikowsky who bequeathed it to the RSC when he died in 1982 ‘for use in theatrical performance’. David Tennant was the first actor to use the skull on stage in a performance.

6. The first actor to play Hamlet was Richard Burbage, the lead actor in Shakespeare’s company, The King’s Men.

7. The castle in which the play is set really exists. It is called Kronborg castle and was built in the Danish port of Helsingør in 1420s by the Danish king, Eric of Pomerania.

8. At the end of every play performed at the Globe, four dancers, two dressed as women, would perform an upbeat, bawdy song and dance routine called a jig – even if the play was a tragedy like Hamlet.

9. Where now we say ‘I’m going to see a play’ in Elizabethan times, people talked about ‘going to hear a play’.

10. Shakespeare advertises his own work in the play.  When Polonius interrupts the players and proclaims that he enacted Julius Caesar and was ‘accounted a good actor’ in Act 3 scene 2, he is reminding the audience that he will soon be starring in Shakespeare’s production of Julius Caesar.

Hamlet Resource Pack: An Introduction

Welcome to the Resource Pack for Hamlet which runs at the Young Vic Theatre from 28 October 2011 to 21 January 2012. Resource packs are created for the majority of Young Vic shows, to provide an insight into the plays we produce and how we produce them. Please check back for interviews with the cast and creative team.

Enjoy!
Taking Part Department

——————————————————————————————–

HAMLET: AN INTRODUCTION

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one of the most famous plays in the world.  It has been translated and performed all over the world, on stage and on screen.  Quotations from the play have become embedded in the language we use today: ‘neither a borrow nor a lender be’, ‘suit the action to the word, the word to the action’, ‘to be or not to be’, ‘the lady doth protest too much methinks’ – all came from Hamlet.  It has been a major influence on culture and on literature, from numerous critical studies, to new plays and stories based on the characters. And, for an actor, young Hamlet is a part that everyone seems to aspire to play.

The play was written sometime between 1599 and 1601.  It is difficult to say precisely when, because publishing worked in a very different way then to now.  It was not so easy to simply type, print and copy; all the texts would have been written by hand.

Three early versions of Hamlet exist, called the First Quarto, the Second Quarto and the First Folio .  The versions are all slightly different – some lines have been added or omitted, and some words are different.  The first quarto of Hamlet was published in 1603 by Nicholas Ling and John Trundell, and printed by Valentine Simmes. It contains about half the amount of text of the second quarto, which was also published by Nicholas Ling in around 1604-5. The first folio, which included all of Shakespeare’s works and was really the first Complete Works of Shakespeare was published in 1623 by Edward Blount and William & Isaac Jaggard. From these three versions, scholars and directors work to reconstitute the ‘original’ Hamlet, but it is almost impossible to know what the original Hamlet was exactly like.

• ‘Quarto’ and ‘Folio’ are names that actually refer to the size of the paper that the text was printed on: if you imagine a sheet of paper, fold it once in half so you have a rectangle, then fold it again into a square, then open it out and lay it flat, you have eight sections, four on the front and four on the back.  This was called a quarto.  If you just fold the paper once into a rectangle and then unfold it, you have four sections, two on the front and two on the back.  This was called a folio. (Try it with a normal A4 sheet!).

Youth Council meets Hamlet cast and creatives

Adam Hipkin, a member of the Young Vic Youth Council and Director of Teafilms Ltd., met with some Hamlet actors and creative team members recently to interview them to produce some content for DVDs that we especially make for schools. Here are some of his thoughts…

______________________________________________________

Hamlet is arguably one of the most recognised of Shakespeare’s plays. It sits amongst Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello and King Lear, as the most popular plays of his canon (the latter of which was performed at the Young Vic in 2009 by the now late Pete Postlethwaite.).

The Director Ian Rickson, who is taking on his first Shakespeare production, is in charge of an exciting cast headed up by Michael Sheen. We went into their rehearsal rooms just up the road from The Young Vic, with a couple of cameras to chat to some of the cast and crew.

The first person we spoke to was Maxine Doyle. Maxine is the Associate Director of Punchdrunk and is the Choreographer on this production. “Hamlet is a super complex play. My process with the work to date has been essentially kind of delving into the psychological investigation of the text”.  Maxine also mentioned to us a part of the play that is being kept top secret by the production team, but I think it’s fair to say that it draws on her work with Punchdrunk.

Next we spoke to Claire Louise Baldwin and Elle While, (Assistant Stage Manager and Assistant Director) about what a modern audience will get from this production. Claire was adamant that “with regards to the actual show and the way it is set, I don’t think it has been done this way before.” Elle on the other hand focused more on the main character: “It’s [about] someone who has lost someone very important in their life. We could all probably think of someone in our own lives going through that right now.”

After a short break while we waited for the actors to come back from lunch we spoke to James Clyde who is playing Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius. We asked him why he thought Hamlet was such a popular play, one which is always being produced somewhere in the world. “It just has this extraordinary verse. If you look at some of Hamlet’s soliloquies every other line has become part of every day speech. It’s the title of a movie or the title of an album. It’s probably the most borrowed from piece of literature in the English language.”

We then caught up with actor Eileen Walsh who is playing the part of Rosencrantz. This character and his friend Guildenstern are both close friends of Hamlet’s, the other key fact being that these roles have always been played by men. Although the casting of Adeel Akhtar (Four Lions) as Guildenstern sticks to this set up, the casting of Eileen as Rosencrantz sees the first women to play the part. “It feels like a piece of new writing. A women hasn’t played it before so it’s just a new take on the whole thing and certain lines that a man says, once they are said by a women, just have a completely different angle.”

The last actor we managed to have a chat with before the afternoon rehearsals started was Pip Donaghy who is playing three different characters: Barnardo, The Player King and the Gravedigger, the latter of which sparks one of the most famous scenes in the play with Hamlet holding the skull of his old Court Jester, Yorick. “In our production they [Barnardo, Player King and Gavedigger]  are going to have the same soul, they are going to be kind of the same character manifesting themselves in different guises.”

As we finished chatting to Pip the rehearsals picked up again and so we had to make room and pack down the kit.

4 weeks at the Young Vic as a Project Assistant

A few times a year, Young Vic’s Taking Part department produces parallel productions for and with young people in Lambeth and Southwark. These parallel productions are productions inspired by what is playing in our Main House, The Maria and The Clare theatres.  For more information on Taking Part please see http://www.youngvic.org/taking-part

I am currently a postgraduate student at The Central School of Speech in Drama getting my MA in Applied Theatre and I had the opportunity to work with the Young Vic as a Project Assistant on the 2011 Parallel Project. How do I even sum up my month working on the project? For three weeks I spent every Monday and Thursday evening working in a studio with fourteen adolescents culminating with a weeklong of intensive all-day rehearsals before the show was performed. I would leave each night smiling ear to ear, skipping to the Southwark station, too hyped to sit still on the journey home. For a whole month, I got the opportunity to witness fourteen immensely talented young actors rehearsing for The Government Inspector. Each night at rehearsal I would sit there thinking to myself, ‘This is exactly where I am meant to be and this is exactly what I am going to do with my life.’ I watched as these young actors honed their skills and cut their teeth on a giant, comedic Russian classic. The cast owned that play and it was a joy to see them as they progressed. Each night I thought, “what a great opportunity these youth are getting and I may or may not be slightly green with envy”. However, the Young Vic gave me an opportunity as well. I am not as young as my students, but I am also at the beginning of my career. What exactly my career is to be, or what it will look like, is still to be ironed out as my course moves on. What I know for sure is that my career will be creating theatre with young people. I knew that before going into this project, but this experience solidified it for me. The Young Vic stayed true to their mission by not only providing a creative outlet for these youth working on The Government Inspector, but also for me as a ‘young’ postgrad student. I look forward to jumping full steam into my career when I graduate this fall and know that I will look back fondly on my month at the Young Vic as a solid stepping stone in what I know will be an incredible ride.

Lauren Sale
Student, Master of Applied Theatre

Working with our Future

A few times a year, Young Vic’s Taking Part department produces parallel productions for and with young people in Lambeth and Southwark. These parallel productions are productions inspired by what is playing in our Main House, The Maria and The Clare theatres.  For more information on Taking Part please see http://www.youngvic.org/taking-part

Hi! My name is Roy Alexander Weise and I’m a graduating Director from BA Hons Directing at Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance. I’ve recently just finished a four-week placement with the Young Vic Taking Part department. I was assistant director to Rikki Henry on the parallel production of Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol. As well as my own professional development as a writer and director I am very concerned with the development of Britain’s future artists. This project was a perfect opportunity to build on my skill as a youth facilitator and director of youth theatre as the project intake was for 14-22 year olds from the surrounding boroughs.

Each day began with chatter, the latest Tinie Tempah song being chanted in the rehearsal room, the latest gossip from Eastenders, all sorts; typical of young people, right? But these young people were not your average…they were extraordinary. They were undertaking the task of performing a famous Russian satire about hypocrisy, about lies, a play that makes a direct statement about hierarchy and democracy. They may not have been aware of the stakes but they knew what the play was about and what the knew what they wanted to do to their audience. “Who’s taking the audience?” bellows one participant, “We are!” reply the rest of the cast. What a delight to know that these young people are learning to take heed to politics and at the same time experiencing working in a professional venue.

The Young Vic is a venue that thinks about its audience as much as its artistic policy. This to me is like holding pure gold itself. To be able to create an environment where you would have some of the most established artists in the industry and young people who have never worked on such projects working in the same building is such an achievement. The young actors worked under the same conditions as professional actors with full-day rehearsals, stage managers and technical crew. They were able to experience the pressure of putting on a theatre production in an established venue. There wasn’t any concern about how good or bad their acting was, nor was there any concern about who came to see their work; it was about the process, about the experience that they had, about the outcomes, how they grew as young people, about being enlightened personally, socially and politically.

This is bedazzling! This showed me that there are still people in the industry who say “YES!” just because you want to give it a go. You don’t have to be an established artist to get involved with work in high-profile venues such as The Young Vic. You just have to want to do it, you have to be willing to commit, willing to learn, willing to leave your comfort zone and take a peek at what is around you, should you want to see it or experience it.

The cast of Government Inspector - parallel production

Most of these young people had never had contact with the Young Vic and some hadn’t even done much drama. It was surprising to see how talented they all were. And also very surprising to see how many of them were beginning to consider careers as actors, writers and directors. Many of them sought advise from me as an emerging artist. I was able to provide first hand experience about auditioning, the difficulty that some might confront during their lives at drama school and what things might be like after – which I am yet to find out. Being around them was like a month-long Tai Chi inhalation of motivation, strength, fun and exuberance.

I hope that this is the beginning of a relationship which where I can continue to be a part of such empowering projects. Young Vic Rocks and Rules!

The parallel production of Government Inspector took place in April. Government Inspector in the Main House begins on 3 June.