Sunday 7 July 2013

#NTCFest - Mobiles and rehearsals...









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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