AUDITIONS for Romeo and Juliet, the Youth Arts Centre fourth production for a youth Shakespeare festival, will be held tomorrow (April 30).
The session will take place at 7pm in the YAC’s Centre Theatre in Kensington Road, Douglas.
The Shakespeare Schools Festival (SSF) is an inclusive, non-competitive festival to be held during October at the Duke Theatre in Lancaster.
The Manx contingent will perform alongside schools from all over the North West of England, producing 30 minute plays and challenging the preconception that studying Shakespeare is difficult or dull by performing in a professional theatre.
The event is not described as a competition. Instead, it aims to focus on the development of the individuals involved and the value of the rehearsal process as well as the end performance.
Head of youth arts Fiona Helleur said: ‘Under the direction of YAC theatre arts worker Ruth Jackson, The Bard’s most famous tragic love story will be presented in any form the actors want, be it period costumes or as Klingons, as the play is very much their play and staff have little to say on the matter.
‘The cast and crew get to imagine their own version of the play and work with actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company, who will come to the island to help with the process – making costumes, design stage lighting and sound. For Macbeth, we made a video of the ghosts and witches and they played their parts on film during the live performance which was great.’
Fiona added: ‘We love the Youth Shakespeare Festival. To date we have performed in Liverpool and London and this year in Lancaster. We have taken The Merchant of Venice, A Winter’s Tale and Macbeth with a very diverse group of young actors, many of whom had never performed Shakespeare before, and found that through this proces, they loved it and demanded to participate again.
‘We performed the Court scene from Merchant on the London Eye as part of the Transformation Trust and would love to do that again. We startled a lot of tourists!’
Rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet will take place on Monday evenings, 7pm to 9pm, in the Youth Arts Centre Theatre, with the aim of taking an original and inspiring version to the festival.
For more audition information, please contact the Youth Arts Centre’s Theatre Arts Department on 437339.