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Youth Theatre - Getting It Right?Dateline: 24th April, 2005I'm a great fan of youth theatre. I've founded and run a couple in my time, and worked with others, and I really do believe that they are an important part of the British theatre scene, as well as being of enormous value to the participants. I've seen a number of YT shows recently and heard reports of others: in fact, I'll be seeing one this evening, in a production of Lorca's Blood Wedding. This week I received a review of a YT production of Wertenbaker's Antigone from BTG Liverpool reviewer Ged Quayle. Now you can rely on Ged's word - he's a professional actor and director and knows what he's talking about - and what he wrote worries me because it accords with a worry that has been growing within me for some time: whatever else a lot of YTs concern themselves with, there seems to be a growing number which do not count basic stagecraft among those concerns. I am reminded of the free expression movement in Engoish teaching in the mid- to late-sixties, when teacher were to encourage children to express themselves through creative writing, but we weren't supposed to inhibit them by insisting on proper spelling, grammar and syntax. In other words, theye wer being encouraged to express ideas and feelings without being given the skills they needed to communicate those ideas and feelings. But that was the time of Pink Floyd's "Teacher, leave those kids alone!", don't make them "just another brick in the wall." I would have thought that by now we would have learned effective communication can only be brought about when the communicator has communication skills, and the communication skills of theatre come from basic stagecraft. Voice production, projection, diction and so on are so basic to theatre that they should form the bedrock of what a youth theatre does, and yet many groups never seem to touch upon them, let alone actually teach them. There are, of course, very honourable exceptions - the Arden Theatre Company whose Dream I reviewed last year is one such - but other YT leaders, consider: if you don't teach your kids to act, how on earth are they going to communicate with their audience?
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