What Oz Said: Lurking in the Background

 What Oz Said: Lurking in the Background 

Firstly, I want to get my sorry bow in early… I don’t normally write stuff…ever…That’s Sarah’s superpower and I try hard not to get involved. However, I suppose I have a unique perspective on YTYT having been there on the journey all the way from the beginning. I will try my best to be original and interesting but if this turns out to be all about how great Sarah is, I apologise. 

Secondly, the other thing that those who know me will attest to is my sharp distaste for deference and anything that approaches it - so the idea of writing something as a 51 year old, privileged white male who has largely stood at the back of shows, turned lights on and clapped enthusiastically for 30 odd years… and then being taken seriously as a writer with some deep perspective… doesn’t sit terribly well. 

I got involved with theatre at school. Actually, truth be told I was talking in a science class aged about 12/13 and got roped into helping set up lighting for the school show as a detention. I’m not saying health and safety has tightened up but there where 3 of us left in a school hall with half a scaffold tower and some elderly lights in the roof and told to crack on while all adult supervision went for a brew. If I was honest, from that point I’ve really not wanted to do anything else and for me nothing ever quite matched the (I still don’t know what the word is to describe it) ‘feeling’ as the show starts. The first moment when everything goes dark and it’s handed over to the techies (I suppose actors are involved as well). Those who have teched with me over the years know even to this day I still get nerves just before a show starts because you genuinely never know if it’ll work.

I thoroughly messed up my A Levels – turns out you need to do some work if you want to pass…who knew? But failing Chemistry and Physics meant I went to Stratford upon Avon where I blagged a job at the RSC on the lighting crew and from that got to into Bretton Hall to do Theatre Design which in 1993 was up there with the best.

Just as an aside and because this writing malarky allows me a small soapbox that none can interrupt, nobody has ever liked the famous person who puts a pic of themselves sipping a cocktail on a yacht around mid-August with the ‘I failed my A levels but look at me now’ line…. But ‘when one door closes a window opens’ is, and always has been, true…if not always comforting. No matter how bad it feels there is always hope.

I mention the RSC to highlight one of the underpinning bits of Yew Tree Youth Theatre. In that we have always tried to make the shows as professional as possible and by professional, I mean taking the art and the endeavour seriously.  We have never had a prompt, actors are disciplined, they have vocal clarity, the show is slick, and we go up on time. Why? Because that’s what you do, that’s the bit you can control, and the age of the cast and the venue are irrelevant. Having seen some bits of amateur theatre recently it turns out that it’s not as common as you might think.

 I’m incredibly proud of the places we have performed from the smallest showing of Yellow Company this year or at Drury Lane in 1996 to Wakefield Opera House, Leeds Playhouse or the National Theatre. You don’t need set, lights, costume (I’m not saying it doesn’t help mind you) to do a professional show, it’s about attitude and leadership. All of the extra ‘stuff’ that’s thrown at a show hoping to see what sticks often covers a fundamental lack of professionalism.  Sarah is demanding to members of YTYT. I make no apologies for that because it’s done with care, generosity and fierce desire for everyone be the best version of themselves as actors and humans – and I think we have a responsibility to try and do both.

30 years is a really long time. I think my over-riding thought is that we have seen so much change in that time, huge shifts in the world, in society as well as in the arts. Funding has been and gone, there have been at least 2 major financial crashes, at least one economic boom, a pandemic, numerous governments and 9 Prime Ministers… but we kept going. I think there are a number of reasons why we, as oppose the many different Arts companies that have been and gone, have survived. 

Fundamentally we have adapted and changed. Arts is a brutally Darwinian ecosystem and companies who weren’t flexible, who relied utterly on Arts council or WMDC funding or who were just plain unlucky have ceased to be. From the start we decided to not rely on funding and base a system on weekly fees – it’s not popular within the sector as it is seen to exclude those who don’t have the resources but relying on capricious and volatile organisations like the Arts Council seemed a worse option. It felt important that we were a constant in an unpredictable world.

Also…Sarah operates best as a benign dictator and her genius would I think be tempered by prolonged exposure to people telling her what she’s allowed to do. 

That then is the person at the heart of it all – Sarah. Who describes YTYT as the Indy kid of theatre and its incredibly apt as we don’t always fit in with the establishment terribly well. She has driven it over the years by sheer force of will and incredible amounts of time and effort which I have been lucky enough to have a front row seat to it all this time. Genuinely no-one will realise how much hard work Sarah puts in – nothing isn’t planned and when you think how many sessions that equates to its mind blowing. We have also been lucky to have worked with some incredible people in Gemma, Sam, Danny and Rob - in fact too many to list as there have been hundreds of assistants etc over the years… But ultimately it was always Sarah who pushed everyone onwards.

Don’t get me wrong we have made mistakes over the years, and it’s never been straightforward – I remember arguing passionately against naming the companies after colours as it seemed silly and ‘Sarah’s Monday night group at Cathedral’ was catchy enough rather than this Sapphire nonsense… It’s hard to remember these things though because we always look at them through the lens of what we decided to do and normally we’ve made that work. We have never had a vision, a mission statement or really any plan past the next show, sometimes it’s better to just see what happens and work with that. The debate around stopping an institution like the Saturday morning session and moving to a Friday night was intense…ultimately it worked out ok.

So, what are the highlights? All 15 miners’ memorial services will be up there – partly because every year someone looks at our little group stood in this massive Cathedral, shakes their head slightly patronisingly and says something like “are you sure they won’t need a mic?” before the tiniest one steps forward and blows the doors off the place. Connections obviously - London - which will always be more of a personal thing watching both Sarah and Tom do their best work on the biggest stage, brilliantly.

I remember Kendal fondly mainly for all the chaos, the lighting change on the line “Scene one. A train” from Vampire Story in 2008, the green room applause, my Dad watching The Wardrobe and being amazed, the scene change in Hacktivists. But it’s the quirky things that stick -  Gee Petts and I mountaineering our way to get into the tech box at the Lamproom in Barnsley, giggling like kids on the Cans at the Phoenix theatre, freezing cold during Halloween at Nostell Priory (as well as missing the fight in the attic), flying to Thornes Park to go to Hospital with Sian whose knee had dislocated, the Sheffield power cut, Classics at Clarke Hall, John’s monologue at the end of Eclipse and trying to fix a 1940’s radio like it was open heart surgery.

Yew Tree Youth Theatre has been a constant for well over half my life and please don’t tell ‘it’ but I’m actually really proud of all its achieved. I’m proud of the legacy of Alumni in a whole host of different careers and that YTYT has either helped, shaped or just been a happy distraction. I’m not sure we can do another 30 years but when we do finally hang up the metaphorical script, we can be pretty certain that it will have touched a lot of lives.