Partner Theatre Here We Come

James Hands, Young Performer, Perfect Circle Youth Theatre

I’m James Hands - part of Perfect Circle writing about what it’s been like doing the Connections Festival.

The play performed by us this year was The Grandfathers by Rory Mullarkey where we took a new approach in tackling the piece. We believed that it would be interesting and beneficial if we were to apply a more strict rehearsal onto the work in hopes that it would end up reflecting in the overall product, which of course is set in a combat situation. To do this we did things like having a set number of press ups to do each rehearsal if a certain number of people turned up late, this of course ended up angering many people, and highlighted the idiots who were coming late far too often!

The characters in the play were such good fun to perform; mine for example was a teenager similar to my age who was disruptive, joked all the time and perceived by everyone else as an imbecile... I still don’t know why I got that part.

In developing the play we also came with an idea for costume, we thought it would be interesting if to show the character’s vulnerability we clothed the characters in pyjamas; in these scenes they were in their early days and we can still see through the dialogue they’re innocents. Then as the play progresses the characters gradually change into a military type uniform which we had as white shirts to show simply how they’re conforming to their Sarge’s ‘ideal soldier.’

We performed our piece at the Elim Theatre in West Malvern over two nights which was great. The crowd seemed to really enjoy it and all our hard work paid off, we all as a cast really enjoyed it, and I think a few of them are also blogging about it so you can hear from their mouths too just how much fun it was.

We’re now all looking forward to performing it again in Warwick. For quite a lot of the group it’s not their first time performing away from home in this festival; however for me it will be a first so again that adds to the excitement. Let’s just hope we can remember our lines!