Birmingham REP’s youth theatre companies are to showcase five productions in the second week of its Young REP Festival.
The Young REP seniors company will stage a double bill of Totally over You, written by Mark Ravenhill and inspired by Les Precieuses Ridicules by Molière, and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis.
In Totally over You, four teenaged girls aim to become famous by ditching their boyfriends and marrying celebrities—but their jilted exes have other plans.
Modern teenagers peer through the mists of time in Iphigenia at Aulis to witness one of the most savage and disturbing chapters of the Trojan war in which a man has to choose between his honour and his daughter’s life.
They will presented at the Old Rep, Birmingham on Tuesday and Wednesday (9 and 10 July).
The Young REP seniors company will also stage two other productions, including a world première, later in the week.
Girls Like That has been written by Evan Placey in a partnership between Birmingham REP, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Theatre Royal Plymouth.
Young people from each of the theatres have worked with Placey to develop ideas and each young company will produce the play this summer.
This time-shifting play “explores young characters today and in the past, the sexual labels they give and judge each other with and the complex and contradictory choices they make in expressing themselves”.
The Young REP seniors company has also devised My Story Is which explores some of the greatest pieces of children’s literature of the past 100 years.
Young REP Playwrights, a group of aspiring writers from Birmingham, have put together Dramatic Acts which will be performed by students from the University of Birmingham.
It catalogues how Birmingham has changed over the past 100 years and looks at whether the city’s people have changed too.
The three pieces will be presented at the Old Rep on Friday and Saturday (12 and 13 July).