Celebrating the past in the present...

Lucy Lindley with the second of our leavers blogs...enjoy!

So this is it. I’m leaving Yew Tree after eleven years to go to University (what on earth am I going to do with my Saturday mornings next year?!). If I was to write about every single wonderful memory I have had with you it would take me another eleven years to do it, so, in order to speed things up a little I have condensed it all down to a few of the more significant moments.

My first performance with Yew Tree was about two nasty witches who set out to ruin Christmas by turning all of Santa’s elves evil. Luckily, a talking Christmas tree broke the spell and saved the day! I was an elf called Trixie and I still have my costume that my mum made from an old Christmas table cloth.

My final performance with Yew Tree was The Party at the End of The World at Nostell Priory this summer. It really was a performance that we could all be proud of and we had so much fun rehearsing it. One of the highlights of the week was when the Nostell Priory Housekeeper (who had done some of the research for the performance) told me that the real Teresa Hepworth would have been really pleased with how I portrayed her.

My BEST is… performing Cinderella with Crimson company. I was Cinderella and Merv was the Prince and during the ball scene we had to dance. Gemma and Dee had spent hours teaching us to waltz and we just about got the hang of it but we could never do the final lift. We used to get to Yew Tree early so that we could practice in the backroom of the Orangery where there was a settee we could use as a crash mat. We never managed to do a good lift in rehearsals but on the night of the performance WE DID IT!!!!!! The unfortunate thing now is that after seeing Merv dance in Giselle I realise that he was probably really good all along and I was the rubbish one. Never mind. After all, I did quit ballet to join Yew Tree.

My BESTY-WORST is… when we performed A Midsummer Night’s dream with Crimson company. I was thrilled to bits with my part as Helena and the whole cast were determined that it was going to be the best thing at the Shakespeare Festival…we had never been more wrong in our whole lives. Things started to go badly from the start as people were mixing their lines up and missing their cues. I found myself on stage alone at one point and had to adlib some Shakespearian sounding words (it was something like “dost not Hermia slumber in these woods?”) it worked anyway as Georgia who was playing Hermia realised that she was supposed to come on and came onstage. Then I messed up a line which meant that the whole “cat fight scene”, as we called it, between Helena and Hermia was missed completely; then Josh who was playing Demetrius found himself onstage alone at one point so he just fell to the ground (supposedly to fall asleep, but it made him look like he had narcolepsy as it made no sense at all for him to fall to the ground at that point). What more could go wrong for such a horrific performance? A horrific ending maybe? WRONG, we didn’t even HAVE an ending as Ben playing Puck said the closing speech at the wrong time, ending the play 20 minutes early and missing out the whole of the scene with the mechanicals. At the time I was utterly mortified with how it had all gone so wrong, but it remains to be one of the funniest memories I have of Yew Tree. (And anyway it turns out that most of our parents in the audience were oblivious to the whole thing as they “don’t get Shakespeare”!!!).

My WORST is… well, I don’t have a worst so I’m just going to list more bests!!

·         That time when I was the only member of the Mafia left and still killed off all of the citizens.

·         Going to see The Wizard of Oz at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

·         Rehearsing and performing Maybe This Time.

·         All of the crazy improvisations derived from games like theatre by chance, park bench and space jump.

·         Spending one of those crazy improvisations speaking entirely in French.

·         Creating Hogsmead in Drury Lane Library and being wizards and witches for the day!

·         Doing The Xmas Factor at St Swithuns.

·         One minute movies.

·         Chair races.

·         Physical theatre.

·         Both performing and watching others perform at Christmas.

·         That day at Gold when we did a huge group improvisation and spent the day outside.

·         The Shakespeare Extravaganza that we performed in the cathedral.

·         The Roald Dahl Extravaganza where I played Miss Trunchball and an Oompa Loompa.

·         Plucking up the courage to play my clarinet at Open Mic Night 9 and the audience’s amazing response!

What I love most about Yew Tree is how pieces of theatre are fabricated from our collective imagination. I probably couldn’t write a good play by myself but it’s amazing how many great plays have now been written that contain some of my ideas.

And of course I have made some of the best friends I’ve ever had at Yew Tree and that makes it so much harder to leave.

Thank you so much YTYT, for everything.

I will miss you all so much!

Lucy Lindley