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Mia writes about her NT Connections experience

This year was my second NT Connections and I've loved every minute of it. Connections is my favourite time of year because it's just great to have that solid peice of theatre to focus on. Chaos is such a beautiful play that makes you truly think about life. It also makes you think about how one event can change a lot of people's lives. It's a very beautiful play to be part of and explore. I love how close you get as a cast, we're all one big family from Grandad Dec to the babies of the group. I work with some truly talented people and it's such a pleasure to see them all grow as actors. For some it's their last connections and this breaks my heart because they will be missed so much, it won't be the same next year without them but they have better things to go onto like drama school and university so we must be happy for them and these simply amazing opportunities. Now we have the next generation carrying on the NT Connections with yew tree which will be a joy. I struggled for weeks with my character because it's surprisingly hard to be angry or upset in a scene and it be believable, but eventually we had a break through even if it meant running 2 laps of a car park, also fully understanding my circumstances helped huge amounts and knowing the motivation of the character as to why she's acting a certain way. The process is always a great one but with Chaos I was a little bit more worried with it being quite a confusing play to sit and read through. I found it was a lot easier to understand once we got it on its feet and started blocking it. Once we had blocked it, we had to become familiar with the order of scenes and finding the links between characters. There are so many links in the play that I think you would have to watch it about 5 times to pick them all up. We decided to make some of them obvious such as putting certain characters on stage at the same time but then other times we left it to the audience to figure out since it's such a thought provoking play. The local performances were a joy and now we have the regional performance at York Theatre Royal to look forward to.

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