Youth's the thing

"YOU feel you want to work for six months and come up with a nine hour epic which will tell all their stories. Unfortunately, the resources don't allow for that."

Directing the National Youth Theatre in Strawberries in December, written by Antoine O Flatharta in collaboration with the 26 young people, is challenging Brian Brady. But he is enjoying the challenge.

"The extraordinary element is: their openess to any kind of approach to the work. They're quite prepared to approach a text any way - purely psychologically, purely intellectually, purely emotion ally - and that's the most obvious difference you feel directing them."

The National Youth Theatre is a cast of young people put together through 293 auditions of members of youth theatres up and down the country. There have been National Youth Theatres before. But this one is the first which will, play on the stage of the National Theatre. Tonight, Strawberries in December opens at the Peacock for a two week run.

The play is set in a convenience supermarket in some anonymous town somewhere in Ireland. Hazel returns from Spain, where she has been working in a bar, when her father, who owned the supermarket dies suddenly. And she is plunged into a job she had always sworn she would not do: "I never saw what was so great about being a shopkeeper. To tell you the truth, I always thought it was sort of demeaning."

Search in vain, however, for the obvious moral it's so nice to serve up to young people. What comes across is a plea for an appreciation of the local: things will not necessarily be better in New Ireland, where Brenda is headed when she has enough hours clocked up in the supermarket. What comes across too, is a protest against the bland internationalism which fills the shops with tasteless, hyped.

"The play's about magic, really, about whether you choose to believe in it or not. It's about wanting and wishing", says John Ruddy (22), from Galway Youth Theatre. "Having strawberries in December is either great, or it demeans the fruit. As, long, as you believe in the magic of it, it's a good thing."

RUDDY plays the vile chat show host, who personifies, bland, mid Atlantic culture, and keeps trying to date Hazel: "It's always nice to explore sides of yourself you keep repressed, like the cynical, sleazeball side", he says. "It's the difference between acting and performing. You have to find a bit of the truth."

"Finding a bit of the truth" seems to be central to the whole youth theatre, process. Gerard Stembridge, Director of Dublin Youth Theatre, has worked extensively for youth theatres for over 10 years, and when he came to cast his first feature film, Guiltrip, he cast four actors he had worked with in Dublin Youth Theatre: Jasmine Russell, Andrew Connolly, Peter Hanly and Michelle Houlden. He had gradually developed a model for working in youth theatre: "I started devising workshop methods by which every actor creates a character. I gave them a chance to explore that character through improvisation. We never talked about the theme or the story of the play, but what actors are great at is creating the traits and physical quirks of character." It's a method which has, he strongly affected his career as a writer and director.

Stembridge was not involved in youth theatre as a young person because there wasn't a youth theatre in Limerick at the time, but there is now a whole generation of ex youth theatre professionals coming on stream, and many of them are anxious to give something back to the movement: Dublin Youth Theatre was absolutely my introduction to theatre", says Brian Brady, who is now an Associate Director at the Abbey. I was an unsporty child in a sporty, scientific, school. When I, got involved in Youth theatre, it was the first time I felt I belonged to something.

The founder of Dublin Youth Theatre, Paddy O Dwyer, an educational psychologist, felt there had to be a place for young people to develop an interest in, drama, as there was a lace, for instance, to develop an interest in soccer. DYT was born in 1977, and the National Association for Youth Drama came along three years later. Based in Dominick Street in Dublin, and funded by the Arts Council and the Department of Education, it provides a network, workshops and resources for the country's mushrooming youth theatres: there are now 50 groups, the majority of which have been established in the last five years: new groups include Fingal Youth Theatre, Droichid Youth Theatre in Drogheda, Kilkenny Youth Theatre and Wexford Youth Theatre. The association aims to stage a National Festival of Youth Theatres, or to form a National Youth Theatre every year, and last year Gerard Stembridge directed: Stage It!, a competition for new scripts, which culminated in five plays being given rehearsed readings in the Peacock Theatre, three as complete works, and two as works in progress. Two of these plays are due to be performed by youth theatres, and two of the other writers have been commissioned to write new plays.

THE Arts Council and the Department of Education in what was then a novel partnership, produced a report called Making Youth Arts Work! three years ago, and one of its major recommendations was that the National Association for Youth Drama, as well as three other organisations, should have a development officer. The money came through about two years ago and Kathy Mc Ardle, now Outreach Officer with the Abbey, was the first incumbent, followed by a young graduate of youth theatre in Bray, Irma Grothuis, NAYD's National Director, Eilis Mullan, fell in love with youth theatre after her first directing stint: "I loved their upfrontness, their honesty, their enthusiasm. We were doing a boring reading of Goldsmith's She Stoops To Conquer, and one of them said: `Excuse me, Eilis, you don't mind me saying, but this play isn't funny.' That was my lead: I realised they had to see the play as funny, or no one would. I'll tell you when it went on in the Eblana it certainly was funny."

"It's difficult, however," she adds, "because you have to take on their problems. Adults have different compartments for things but they don't, and you can't abandon them at the end of the workshop.

Brian Brady, who is 31, sometimes looks across the rehearsal room and remembers feeling a teenager's embarrassment at performing in front of other people, but he sees a buoyancy in his young cast, aged from nine to 24, which is different from the moods of his generation: "They have a confidence and a belief in the future. It's more of a youth friendly culture we live in now, and may be we feel less threatened by teenagers.

Both Brady and Mullan are adamant that youth theatre is not about creating youth professionals, it is about the personal development of young people. The National Youth Theatre has given a group from all over Ireland the chance to spend six weeks working together in the capital, the younger ones staying with families, and the older ones in rented houses, some of which are, Brady reports, "like war zones": "There's been no romances as yet, but I'd say on the last night, with the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth...

"You do unusual stuff in rehearsals", says Simon Boyle (16) from Tallaght Youth Theatre. "If anyone saw you, they'd say, `What the f**k?'" But it's important to be able to make a fool of yourself in front of hundreds of people. And you learn to be thrown in at the deep end and meet people as last as possible."

"We've only known each other a few weeks, and we get on so well," says Emma O'Brien (18) of Dry Rain in Bray.

"There's no cliques, just one big clique," adds Simon Boyle.

"It's mostly, nearly all about confidence," says Catherine Darker (17) from Red Lemon in Dun Laoghaire. "It builds up your confidence for social matters. So many people have been brought out of their shells, and they even look happier.