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We're doing it for the kids...

Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Daniels and Philip Ridley have all written new plays for young people. What's in it for them, asks Heather Neill, who previews this year's Connections festival

Sunday 23 March 2003 01:00 GMT
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In the recurring debates about new writing at the National Theatre (Are enough writers encouraged? Will they attract new audiences?), Connections – the annual festival of new plays for young people to perform – is frequently overlooked. Perhaps this is because the pieces are short, perhaps because they are tailor-made for casts aged 12 to 20. Nevertheless, now in its 11th year and reborn as Shell Connections 2003 (thanks to £500,000 sponsorship from the oil company), the festival has accounted for more than 50 commissions. The list of authors, including several from other European countries and ranging from Alan Ayckbourn to Peter Gill and Bryony Lavery, is impressive.

This year they include Jon Fosse, Norway's leading playwright, Sarah Daniels, scriptwriter for Grange Hill and EastEnders, Mark Ravenhill, author of Shopping and Fucking, and Philip Ridley, novelist and screenwriter of The Krays. From this Friday new work by these and six other writers can be seen in regional festivals in 13 partnership theatres, from the Lyric, Belfast, to the Theatre Royal in Plymouth and starting in Newcastle. A selection of the productions will come to the Olivier and Cottesloe in London for a week in July.

Mark Ravenhill heard about the scheme during the run of his Mother Clapp's Molly House at the National and was so taken with it that he "tracked down" Connections' producer Suzy Graham-Adriani and lobbied for a commission. An uncompromising writer whose work frequently equates sex with commerce, Ravenhill claims to be something of a romantic: "Love usually takes over in the end." Totally Over You, his contribution to Connections, is no exception. He cites a short piece by Molière, Les Precieuses Ridicules, as an inspiration for this sassy comedy about the follies of seeking celebrity. Four 14-year-old friends pledge to ditch their boyfriends in favour of finding more famous ones so that "if we choose the swordfish over the caviar in a restaurant they're going to analyse it live on CNN". The boys get their own back by pretending to be a newly-discovered boyband for whom girlfriends are a career no-no.

Ravenhill's main characters, Kitty and Jake, take their names and some characteristics from the children of friends – "the two 14-year-olds I know best," he says. He listens to young talk at Camden Market: "It's always packed at the weekend with people who have their noses pierced and hair sprayed – but I've tried to write dialogue that is fairly neutral so that kids anywhere can bring their regional accents and rhythms to it."

Sarah Daniels' subject arrived by post. Three of her friends, including Suzy Graham-Adriani, noticed a newspaper cutting about the grave of a female gladiator recently discovered near London Bridge, and sent it to the feminist Daniels. She had already written one Connections play, in 1999, Taking Breath, about a tree-top protest. Considerable research has gone into the time-slip plot of Dust as well as some self-confessed "terrible" jokes (someone is "three ravens short of a stew") and food references intended to have a high yuck-factor: crunchy dormice and stuffed thrushes are on sale to the blood-thirsty spectators at the Games. Daniels has invented a couple of cheerleader types, the Girlie Glads who paint themselves in Roman make-up, to contrast with the skilled female warriors. Her heroine, Flavia, bullied in her own time, is able to find her feet in the ring and return with more confidence to a world of tube trains and terrorism.

The centre-piece is, naturally, a sword-fight. "There is evidence," says Daniels, "that women fought as skilfully as men, but whether they were accepted in an equal way we don't know." Titillation probably came into the equation in Roman times, just as it might today.

Daniels is beginning a round of visits to Dust performances in different regions. Philip Ridley has already seen quite a few productions of his new work and entered into email correspondence with young casts. His play Brokenville, like two others in the same sequence, the phenomenally successful Sparkleshark and Fairytale Heart, celebrates the power of storytelling. Five young people arrive separately, each without a remembered past, in a derelict house after an unnamed catastrophe. Here they find a frightened child and are joined by an old woman who teaches them how to weave stories as tough as the Grimms', encompassing jealousy, disappointment and death. "The old woman," says Ridley, "is a modern witch, a very, very old Mary Poppins, no-nonsense and unsentimental." His young correspondents express his own feelings as we fall into war: "The play seems to be getting more relevant. We could all be in Brokenville." By the end of the piece a kind of catharsis has been achieved. They have learned to survive.

Ridley's starting-point was a documentary shot of a traumatised Bosnian child in a gutted house. Jon Fosse, sitting in his bare room overlooking a Norwegian fjord, "dreaming in a conscious state" (his definition of writing), returned to an earlier idea for his play Purple (which David Harrower has translated into English). "I wrote most of it some years ago, but had no address for it." The plot seems simple: it merely records the exchanges between the members of a band who have met to rehearse in a cellar and a girl about whom there seems to be some rivalry. This is a deceptively sophisticated play, about what is not or cannot be expressed between people, about the myriad possible interpretations of words and actions, about unspoken violence and shifting emotion. Fosse describes it as "like a song. You can sing it in different ways". An intriguing challenge for performers of any age.

The National's in-coming artistic director, Nicholas Hytner, is a Connections fan. "It's a model," he says, "of what the theatre should be, and of what I hope the National Theatre will be in years to come." There is already talk of exchanges with Australia next year. As Sarah Daniels puts it, not quite in gladiatress speak, "It's fab!"

Information about all the plays and performances can be found at www.shellconnections.org. Or call 020 7452 3313 for more details

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