Nick Hern has launched its second batch of Multiplay Drama scripts in electronic form; these are large-cast plays written specifically for young people to perform, commissioned by UK youth theatres and drama schools and written by a mixture of established and newer writers.
They vary enormously in style, subject and length, but none of them takes an easy or patronising approach to their intended performers or audiences, each offering challenges that even an experienced adult cast would have to wrestle with. Almost all of the plays in this collection would be most appropriate for young people at the older end due to their complexity, subject matter or language, but there is one that much younger actors and audiences could have plenty of fun with.
A Dream by Chris Bush
This play offers many different challenges by itself, as not only is it the longest play in the collection, but it is a full-length, two-act musical with multiple locations and a cast list containing 85 named characters plus a band, festival-goers and “various extras”.
Bush has created a mash-up of many different Shakespeare plays but centred around a contemporary rewriting of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in a hospital. Tatiana and O’Brien are rival consultants fighting over talented junior doctor Rajesh—O’Brien recruits the skills of young pharmacy worker Puck. Senior administrator Pauline Quince and her overbearing assistant Nick Ramsbottom are putting on a play with some teenage patients, while a camera crew are in the building filming a documentary.
The four confused lovers on the run are still integral to the play, with Helena as a nurse, but we also see a Mr R Montague come in as an overdose patient with “another right behind him”, Rosalind as a student who tells her friend Celia she will dress up as a man to see if she is taken more seriously (but no one is fooled), a middle-aged couple called Beatrice and Benedick still bickering after 28 years of marriage and lots more little Easter eggs for those who know their Shakespeare to spot.
But far from being an intellectual exercise, this is a fast-moving, sharply witty script that is loads of fun, but still has some poignant moments, such as Miranda and Ferdinand collecting her frail father Prospero as nurse Ariel packs his bag.
As We Face the Sun by Kit Withington
Withington’s play can be performed by any number of actors as it is written as a series of lines, some directed to other characters and many telling the story directly to the audience, which are not allocated to any particular person. This works for most of the narration and some of the dialogue, but there are parts where clearly certain lines are meant to be spoken by the same character, which presents performers with a puzzle that is, in my view, an unnecessary obstacle.
However, the twists and turns of the story with its jumps back and forward in time are an intriguing puzzle for the audience to piece together. It begins in 2012 when our storytellers are in year 10 and about to go on a school trip, which ends in a tragic accident, then jumps to 2023 when the same people, now in their mid-twenties, are preparing the back room of a pub for some kind of reunion. The rest of the play jumps between the two periods, looking at how they coped (or not) with the aftermath of the accident as teenagers and how priorities have changed for many of them as adults, despite what they promised one another as children.
It’s an intriguing study of the after-effects of trauma and how they develop over time, but isn’t without humour and works well overall.
Horizon by Kwame Owusu
Owusu also disrupts the timeline for a play that takes us into a John Wyndham-style urban fantasy in which a group of school kids see strange lights in the sky one evening and then wake up with new superpowers: one can hear people’s thoughts, another can see through walls, another can see nine seconds into the future, while one can freeze time.
They get together to decide what to do; some want to go public to help others or achieve some kind of fame, while some are more cautious, not wanting to be thought of as ‘freaks’ or even imagining they’ll be experimented upon by the authorities. The fact that the whole story is told in the form of a series of interviews to the mysterious ‘investigators’ who “exist in the shadows”, hidden in darkness, and “use live microphones to interview the students” suggests where they are all heading.
This is a fun mix of school banter, superhero fantasy and conspiracy story that would be great fun to do for the cast of ten.
Sea Things by Hassan Abdulrazzak
This is one of the longer plays in the collection, with a cast of 18 named parts who also double up as chorus. Set in the year 2050, it is a pretty standard post-apocalyptic, dystopian fantasy in which the majority of the characters are holed up in a displacement camp in an old English Manor House, cut off from the outside world, after their town was flooded.
The camp is run by a private company, but despite taking money from them for everyday needs, they constantly have power cuts and food and medical supplies are scarce. Some are offered jobs and leave, never to be heard from again, which makes some of them suspicious, but others believe that those in charge know what they are doing. But in a sci-fi twist to the story, it seems that perhaps nature is fighting back after the way it has been treated by humans.
The dialogue can be a bit clunky, with characters explaining things at great length to one another that they all already know just to get them across to an audience and some of the many issues it touches on are brushed over rather than properly dealt with, but there are a few interesting twists and it raises some subjects for discussion.
Small by Holly Robinson
Small is another play that gradually builds up a picture of what it’s about through many short scenes. Its 19 characters are doctors, nurses, staff, family and volunteers for a clinical trial of a procedure that promises to defeat ageing by transforming adults back into children to live their lives all over again.
The participants are all there for different reasons: one is an undercover tabloid journalist hoping to report on the trial’s failure; one wishes to use the money she gets for volunteering to send her twin sister to Germany for pioneering cancer treatment; another is concealing Huntington’s disease from the doctors, which he hopes the process may cure; one has a girlfriend who doesn’t want her lover to become a four-year-old child; then there is the one whose mother has died but who has recently been reunited with her father whom she hasn’t seen since she was five.
The result is a well-written exploration of a number of different adult themes and situations revolving around different types of relationships that would be very interesting for a young cast to delve into.
Space Girl by Helen Stanley
This play stands out in the collection as the only one clearly aimed at younger casts and audiences; it was originally written for primary-aged performers with a few older actors to play the adults.
Although it is the shortest play, it still features songs, suggestions of additional music and filmed sequences and 20 named characters, though Mary Moon, whose nickname forms the title, is actually played by three people who take it in turns to be in the scenes while the other two narrate from the side.
Mary is obsessed with outer space and boasts that her father is a ‘space man’. However her father leaves home and her mother, who is also her teacher, won’t tell her or her older brother JJ where he has gone. Then the play slips into fantasy as she concludes he must be lost on the moon and she uses his rocket in the garden shed to go and look for him. There she encounters Mike, a new boy at school, who is also looking for his dad, and they come across space creatures who refer to the earth children as 'aliens' during their quest.
Of course all ends happily in a play that I’m sure would be great fun for a junior youth group to put on.
The Multiverse is Gay! By Lewis Hetherington
Hetherington’s lead character Amber also travels between worlds, but this isn’t space travel; Amber is zapped into the multiverse when they touch a ‘Golden Beaver’ statue in Dean Gardens in Edinburgh (this really exists, although it’s actually brown and an otter) to meet 600 other versions of themself in an unstable ‘between worlds’ place.
This is after Amber has turned up in full prom dress to meet a group of friends, none of whom is dressed up and some insistent that they are not going. Amber is feeling like a fish out of water, as though they don’t belong anywhere, but on arriving in ’The Big Nowhere’, still wishes to return to where they came from.
Despite the title and the author’s note that there are queer relationships amongst these characters, the play also works as a universal story of an adolescent struggling to fit in and feel at home in the world and in their own skin, but told through a sci-fi plot that works pretty well and with plenty of humour.
But the Cabaret at the End of the Multiverse (a nod to Douglas Adams there perhaps?), based on a picture that Amber drew in graphic novel they tried to write at the age of 13, does come across as a full-on gay floorshow.
The Playhouse Apprentice by Jessica Swale
Swale has taken real events from late sixteenth century London and turned it into an argument for the importance theatre for both its impact on audiences and its economic importance both to the people who create it and to businesses in the surrounding area. It’s like an Arts Council report but a lot more fun—though the arguments are just as ineffective with those with power in the play as they are now in real life.
It begins with a performance of Ben Jonson’s The Isle of Dogs at Bankside Theatre in 1597, which is halted by the Lord Chamberlain for its unflattering portrayal of both the Queen and Parliament. Apprentice player John Pygge is sent with a petition to the Lord Chamberlain, but struggles to get north of the river because the boatmen can’t make it pay now no one is coming across to the theatres. The petition falls on deaf ears, so Pygge has to find new signatures—and new ears for his compelling argument for theatre.
This short piece for around twenty named parts plus additional actors, passers-by, zealots and wherrymen has a basis in historical fact but with a still-relevant message and plenty of comedy.
The Village by Abi Falase & Tatenda Shamiso
The writers of this play, with 23 named parts plus ‘protesters’, have given actors the freedom to “make the language and the characters your own” as “a lot of inspiration was taken from our original cast”. With its loose plot and frequent, often satirical references to aspects of modern youth culture, it does have the feel of something that may have had its roots in a piece devised by young people.
It begins with protest by the youth of the UK; it isn’t clear exactly what they are protesting about, or even if they are all protesting about the same things, but it is widespread and disruptive enough for the Prime Minister to negotiate the creation of a ‘Youth Emancipation village’ run by the young people themselves, which becomes a sort of hippie Lord of the Flies, with perhaps a bit of Animal Farm thrown in.
The utopian vision of a society that doesn’t use money and where everyone only works or goes to school if they want to begins to fall apart when no one wants to work in sanitation, money runs out for food and some are worried about their prospects and preparedness for university, jobs or life in general after they ‘age out’ of the village.
It is a little overstuffed with references and ideas that makes it a bit confusing at times, but there is certainly plenty to have fun with in the rehearsal room with this one.
Wellington 24 by Rachel Harper
This lovely two-act play with a few songs has its roots in a 1943 documentary—available on YouTube—about a factory in North Wales that set itself the task of building a Wellington bomber in 30 hours in aid of the Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund. With a cast of 22 named parts, mostly female, plus extra Factory Girls, it occasionally utilises parts of the film, but largely this is the story behind the cameras of the women workers and life during wartime on the home front.
It isn’t really a spoiler to say that they shattered the record, as this serves only as what Hitchcock called a ‘McGuffin’. The real story is about the women who are working in traditionally male jobs for the war effort, while many have husbands or boyfriends away fighting or have lost someone in the war.
There is a triangle between one of the women, the soldier she has been seeing who wants to get married the next time he is on leave in case something happens to him and another worker in the factory. Then there is the new girl with the posh voice whom some of the others insist is a spy because she speaks German and gave up a much more prestigious post to work in the factory.
The play raises difficult questions without trying to present easy answers about relationships, war and collective responsibility for terrible acts in a way that evolves naturally through the banter between well-drawn characters, which is often very entertaining.