National Theatre Connections Plays at the Bonington Theatre – Friday 15th March

This was a great evening where 40 of our young people performed plays written specifically for young people to a supportive audience of family and friends. Each play had its own challenges but the groups handled them all so well and performed brilliantly. The Senior groups performed extracts of their plays and the Young Company performed the full play in front of the National Theatre Director who was very impressed.

• Senior Drama (Mondays) performed Salt by Dawn King where a group of 16/17 year olds have been encouraged to take up the opportunity for an apprenticeship in China which will train them and give them the tools to secure a well-paid job at the end of their two years. During their voyage on the ship, they have to compete with other teams on mental tasks to ensure that their work placements are the best. However, as their ship docks in the port in China, another group who have been there for a year, hijack their cabin and force the group to turn the ship around because they have experienced a year of forced labour which was definitely not the apprenticeship they were led to believe it was.

• Senior Youth Theatre (Saturdays) performed Old Times by Molly Taylor where a group of 12/13 year olds decide to make a film about a mad tramp who lives in the basement of an old derelict house. They take the slime, lights, cameras, phones to the Anston House and Tom Joy, the most volatile member of the group brings a knife to make the scene more realistic. However, their quarrels and arguments cause events to get out of hand and a policeman is stabbed but who had the knife at the time of the stabbing?

• Young Company performed Wind/Rush Generation(s) by Mojisola Adebayo. Flying High performed this play in 2020/2021 at the time of lockdown with a previous group but this year’s group chose it again. It is a very challenging play and took its inspiration from the injustices surrounding the Windrush scandal of 2018. Monte Rosa was a German cruise ship who was captured by the British during WW2 and renamed ‘Windrush’. She was sent to the Caribbean to transport people back to Tilbury Dock to start a new life in the UK. The framing device for the play is a ghost story where a group of 6 History students are fulfilling a dare by taking an Ouija board into the ‘Windrush’ room of their university. In the austere room with its wooden panelling on the walls are portraits of white, male academics who had made money from the slave trade in the past and donated it to the university. The students summon up the ghost of Monte Rosa and disturbed so much more than they bargained for – horrific stories from history of how black people and people of colour were treated. The students eventually exorcise the ghost and begin a protest to ensure that the university pays more attention to equality, acknowledging the roles black people have played in the past through books, literature, paintings accessible to all students and ensure that there is parity in the courses they offer and the outcomes are unbiased.

Our Young Company learned so much about the history of the British Isles and Europe, the stories, the colonialism, the heroism and the resilience of people in difficult times. We are all really proud of our final production and work as a company. We are looking forward to performing at Derby Theatre at the end of April.