Written by Jessica Mulle, Jigsaw Arts Youth Theatre
It’s amazing how much refining can be done when you really
put in everything. I think I speak for everyone when I say this really is the
hardest we’ve worked at something, and we have come such a long way – as
performers, in our show itself, as a company and as people.
Performing at the National Theatre really is a dream come
true for everyone. As a young person who aspires to be a professional actor,
this is so much more than I would have dreamed of achieving at 17. Being told
that we were to perform in the Olivier Theatre in front of 1200 made all our
hard work and effort so worthwhile! Once we heard our result, our company knew
that we had to rise to a new challenge. Working with the NT Connections
directors has given us insight in what it is like to perform in a theatre of
this scale. Talking to the NT directors about what technical elements we would
love to include within the performance we have been astounded at the resources
we have been offered. This has really opened our eyes to the scale of what we
are performing on. Furthermore, having the opportunity to perform to the writer
Jim Cartwright, blew us all away, it really was inspiring and so helpful to
hear his insight.
The whole company loves Mobile Phone Show – it moves rapidly
from hilarious to heart wrenching to poignant and the audience are swept along
in this range of emotions. We feel so privileged to be working with the NT
Connections team who have invested so much in us. Having the opportunity to
work on such an amazing play with people I think of as family and doing
something we love is incredible.
What I’ve enjoyed most about this experience is seeing our
production blossom, friends and family who watched our original performance
commented on how they couldn’t believe how much refining and polishing we had
achieved by the time we performed at the Arts Depot. Once we had been notified
of our success and impending performance at the Olivier Theatre this inspired
us all to be even greater. We knew we
had more work to do to bring our play to such a massive performance space and
we have all relished this and are proud of our achievements.
Mobile Phone Show includes a lot of chorus work which was
unfamiliar to many of our group and was possibly the biggest challenge,
certainly for me. We had to ensure that the choreography was perfectly timed
and executed and work on building our stamina to stay on stage for the whole
play; this has been very demanding and a large focus of our work. Overcoming
these challenges and seeing our chorus work come together has been incredible
and everyone really has put in so much (including our amazing directors!).
Bringing our production to the National Theatre is something
incredibly daunting, yet unbelievably exciting at the same time! Certainly
there’s nothing that I’ve achieved in my life that I feel so proud of and I
can’t believe how lucky we are to be given this opportunity.
We really can’t thank NT Connections, Jim Cartwright and
everyone involved in this process enough.
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