Following their main house debut with Uncommon Riches last summer, Young Rep has been staging ‘Order and Chaos’, a festival of politically-charged plays, featuring twenty-one shows and over four hundred of Birmingham’s young performers at The Rep Theatre in Birmingham.
The Festival was supported by the Joyce Farley Educational Trust, as The Rep is a registered charity, with an acclaimed learning and outreach programme. The Rep has nurtured new talent throughout its long history, from Laurence Olivier and Peter Brook to the gifted actors in its modern-day youth theatre.
The ground-breaking Rep Foundry theatre-makers programme has offered opportunity and training for thousands of early career writers, directors, and artists, and the Young Rep is The Rep’s celebrated theatre company for youths aged 7–18. Young Rep groups meet weekly at The Rep to create incredibly performances, nurturing and inspiring the next generation by staging new works, devising original pieces of theatre and performing iconic and established plays. An inclusive environment, the Young Rep welcomes children and young people from all backgrounds.
Speaking on the topic of the Order and Chaos Festival, Head of Young Rep Becky Deeks said:
‘Pulling together a festival of this size has been an unbelievable team effort and also a huge privilege. At The Rep, we work with incredible young people and community casts across the West Midlands and we are excited to bring them together to present 21 unique and powerful performances.’
Deeks went on to say ‘I want to thank you, the audiences. Without your support, this festival wouldn’t be possible. I hope you enjoy watching some of Birmingham’s most exciting talent perform on the stage at The Rep’.
This weekend, we were lucky enough to be invited to view several of the fantastic productions at the theatre during the final few days of the festival, including The Trials, Noughts and Crosses and Lord of the Flies.
THE TRIALS
On Friday evening, the Young Rep in partnership with the Donmar Warehouse rocked the boat with their incredible production of The Trials, Dawn King’s original play about an apocalyptic climate crisis culminating in our near future. A jury comprised of a vegan, pronoun-sharing, comfortably queer and eco-conscious generation are summoned to preside over the trials of a series of ‘defendants’, seemingly ordinary older citizens, whose ‘dinosaur’ ideas about sustainable living have damned the planet. Growing up in a world of loss, wherein the youths have missed out on planes, snow, ice-cream and a peaceful childhood with their families, they must determine whether to condemn the ‘dinosaurs’ to death for their crimes against the planet, or to resist their biases and spare their lives.
The play raises some thought-provoking questions about our environmental impact, crime and punishment, empathy and our futures, and the cast at The Rep did an incredible job at bringing King’s work to life. This is quite possibly the best and most professional youth theatre show I have had the privilege of watching, and we left the theatre feeling entirely stunned by the sheer power of both the cast and the premise of the show.
A special mention must go to the young actor playing Tomaz (Miles Dunkley), who had such a remarkably enigmatic presence and delivered naturalistic, smooth comedy in a display of rare showmanship. The differentiation between characters was well-achieved – it can be easy for several characters to be overshadowed, with fewer clear-cut personalities than others, but the cast did an excellent job creating distinct personas for all twelve jury members.
There was something immensely refreshing about the flip in generational blame. This production is enhanced by its contextual social politics – news outlets are quick to make a spectacle of generation z, dismissing their ideologies and practices as ‘wokery’. In The Trials, veganism, queerness and mild anti-natalism are standardised, and this creates an interesting framework through which to analyse the practices of older generations. Importantly, we hear a defence from the accused, and on their behalf – they are not faceless ne’er-do-well symbols, but fallible and relatable human beings. The ongoing debate amongst the jurors is whether their desire to punish the ‘dinosaurs’ is due to a desire for justice and environmental good, or to fulfil their need for revenge. One can only hope that this play, in all its productions, will encourage intergenerational understanding, and collective action towards a greener society.
The Rep’s production was directed by Becky Deeks and Mathias André, with assistant directors Janeel Brown and Madeleine Kludje.
NOUGHTS AND CROSSES
During the Saturday matinee performance, we watched a production of Noughts and Crosses by the Young Rep Seniors, adapted by Dominic Cooke from the original text by Malorie Blackman.
For fans of the original book, there was much to enjoy in this adaptation. Cooke’s play is incredibly faithful to the original text, with scenes and lines almost copy-and-pasted straight from page to stage. While this was delightful in some aspects, it did mean that the running time for the play was somewhat excessive, coming in at around the three hour mark. The second act could have been drastically slimmed down, as the pace did falter a little at times, largely due to the inclusion of additional actors monologuing the internal thoughts of Callum and Sephy.
However, this is no reflection on the cast, who were phenomenal. The main actress playing Sephy delivered such an incredible performance, with the professionalism of a seasoned actress twice her age. She co-starred opposite a brilliantly-cast Callum, and the pair’s on-stage chemistry was palpable. Though the ‘inner’ Sephy and Callum’s did little to move the plot forwards (we had assumed they would take over the roles as the characters aged, but they did not), they added an impressive emotional weight and a further dimension to the characters.
The play centres the pair in a Romeo and Juliet star-crossed-lovers environment. Sephy comes from a Black family of ‘Crosses’, privileged in society over the white ‘Noughts’. The daughter of a wealthy politician, Sephy’s life is a far cry from Callum’s background in poverty. Their precarious friendship is put to the test when Callum is amongst the handful of ‘nought’ students sent to the ‘cross’ school, and tensions threaten to tear them apart.
In this moving Rep production, directed by Jasmine Hylton, with assistant director Ryan Lewis, sensitive themes of racism and terrorism were sensitively handled. Scenes of intimacy were also maturely conducted, thanks to intimacy director Christina Fulcher. The production was a moving tribute to a hugely popular novel, with a dynamic surrounding cast.
Another spectacular performance coming from the actress playing Meggie, Callum’s mother, who must navigate not only the social divide and the prejudice she has experienced at the hands of Sephy’s mother, but also the divisions amongst her family, as extremism and a desire for racial equality overlap with devastating consequences. Again, as a youth actress, playing the role of a mother which such gravitas is to be commended.
The long running time was untraditional for youth theatre, and though the second act felt slow in places, the capability of these young actors to deliver such an impeccable performance over this extended time was a great credit to Birmingham’s up and coming talent. I am thoroughly excited to see what future works are in store for this cast of gifted young people.
LORD OF THE FLIES
We rounded off the weekend with an evening performance of Lord of the Flies by The Company, adapted by Nigel Williams from William Golding’s original work. This was a shining example of Birmingham Theatre, to exactly the high standard we have come to expect from The Rep.
This reimagining of a classic text takes place on an island, where a group of plane children rule the roost having found themselves seemingly the soul survivors of a plane crash. What begins with early attempts to form democratic structures and maintain discipline crumbles into chaos and tragedy, as they begin to crack under the fear of the omnipresent ‘beast’.
This production was professional, funny and haunting, all at once. The pacing was entirely spot on, and brought us along on the journey from Piggy’s (Loretta Thompson) hilarity and the discovery of the conch to the violence of the hunt and its ensuing terror. Special credit must go to movement director Lucy Wild for the magical opening scene, and the smooth choreography of the initial power struggle. We knew we were in good hands the moment the play began, and the cast’s movement was symbiotic. A mention should go to Ibrahim Ibrahim here, for his physicality even when not delivering spoken lines – he was the beating heart of the wild and tribal hunters. Miles Dunkley shined once again in this performance, and demonstrated his incredible range – we almost failed to recognise him from his vastly different character in The Trials. Ralph was also a stand-out leading performance.
Directed by Becky Deeks with assistant director Alice Chambers, this production of Lord of the Flies was the perfect way to round off an incredible Chaos and Order Festival at The Rep Theatre.
The festival was a testament to the Young Rep, and The Rep Theatre as a whole. It is crucial to support the arts, now as much as ever, so do keep an eye on the Rep to see what fantastic performances they are bringing to a stage near you.
