Youth Theatre Online: The Crucible

Week 3: 06/04/2020

Live Artist Q&As

We have an online live Q&A lined up from theatre maker and LAMDA graduate Rosa Hesmondhalgh about Creating and Devising Your Own Work on 20^th April at 3.30pm. Here is Rosa talking about her play Madame Ovary with Lorraine on ITV with her aunt and actress Julie Hesmondhalgh! Attached is the Madame Ovary script to help you start thinking of your questions for Rosa!

The Crucible: this week’s play screening

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a partially fictionalised telling of the Salem witch trials of 1692/3. Accusations of witchcraft following a game played by the daughters of a Massachusetts village spiral out of control and many must choose between their reputations and their integrity.

Inspirational online resources

• Check out West End show Wind in the Willows streaming for FREE for a limited time
• Don’t forget you can still watch One Man, Two Guvnors starring James Corden online. The National Theatre are screening a different play every Thursday
• Gecko Theatre have released a mind-bending physical theatre piece called The Time of Your Life, made for the BBC
• Act out Middle Child’s Christmas Panto with their DIY kit here (we’d love to see your videos!) – they also have a second week of writing challenges
• Andrew Lloyd Webber is sharing his musicals online with The Show Must Go On – one every Friday for 48 hours:

Looking forward to sharing more theatre resources next Monday. What did everyone think of The Disappearing Number? Check out Matty’s review below!

Hope you and your family are keeping well.

Very best wishes,

Ruth, Matt and Matty 🙂

*The Disappearing Number Review: Matty

This week’s piece felt like a tricky watch where I didn’t quite feel I had a grip on what they were doing. I have to say I felt quite lost at many moments during A Disappearing Number, and I don’t think this was just down to the fact that I’m certainly no mathematician, I don’t think the goal was to really explain how the maths work, but they certainly still managed to give my brain a workout in following the story. I do however understand that they had a difficult job in translating a mathematician’s story to the stage without explaining the maths, and actually this became a story of an incredible academic relationship and in particular the passion and extraordinary mind of Srinivasa Ramanujan. I grasped that the structure wasn’t chronological early on; they explained this cleverly through maths that I just about understood, the idea that all time is linked and actually like numbers there aren’t really gaps in between numbers just a series of infinities (mind still blown), but this unfortunately still didn’t help me to get a hold on how many time zones or ages we had running, as if they were in the present, on stage at one time…I’m not sure I’ve even understood myself there. It was complex for sure, and there is nothing wrong with complex theatre as this is bound to have made a lot more sense to other audience members and the fact that we can all take something different from that shared experience is incredibly exciting, I was just left a little frustrated that I couldn’t quite keep up with what was going on, remember The River and The Mountain?

I did however leave with it having made me think a couple of things. One, I will always find maths difficult to comprehend whether put on stage or not. And Two, that maths exists in our world in an INCREDIBLE way and that humans who seek to explore its uses as a way to understand the world are actually very similar to us as artists. The art of numbers, and as the show calls it “the mathematical reality”, possesses its own beauty, patterns, games and rules that we look for in a similar way to the way we create theatre, music and art. We as humans will always search for understanding through mediums we resonate with most, maybe we can’t always explain why we all prefer different ways of learning than others, but it’s vital we have people excited and passionate to explore the complexities of life in all sorts of ways, whether through: arts, maths, or a whole realm of other studies.

This news item was posted on 7 April 2020.