Connections Festival: The Heights / Model Behaviour
Details
- Category: Theatre
Theatre Partner
Full Description
Connections is the National Theatre’s annual, nationwide youth theatre festival, running for 28 years. Each year, schools and youth theatres across the country perform a new piece of writing developed for the programme at their home venues before visiting a festival theatre. Trinity is proud to host seven young companies this year as part of its festival programme.
Each ticket is only £5 and gives you access to an evening of two one act plays, with a short interval in between.
The Heights
by Lisa McGee, performed by Angmering College
A play about stories. Lillie is a teenager who lives on the Heights Estate. A place where nothing ever happens, except in Lillie’s head. Lillie’s not like most people, definitely not. For starters, she never goes out, but sits in her bedroom window on the sixth floor of her tower block, watching the world and the people in it go by – though sometimes some of those same people enter her world. As she sits, she makes up stories. Some of these stories are sad, some are happy, some are funny and some are just wonderful. However, whatever they are, they are just stories. Aren’t they?
No one would play catch in the middle of the street with a loaded gun, or use the same gun to frighten a stranger as they slept in their bed. And no one could give birth to a baby made of glass, or murder their twin brother over an argument about what they should spend their money on IF they won the lottery… would they? Surely these are all just stories, dark, curious, beguiling figments of Lillie’s fertile imagination aren’t they?
Lisa McGee, an award-winning screenwriter and playwright from Derry, is the creator, writer and executive producer of the acclaimed DERRY GIRLS. She co-created, co-wrote and was executive producer on THE DECEIVED with her husband Tobias Beer and was creative director, executive producer and wrote an episode of the BBC monologues on poverty SKINT. Her other TV credits include LONDON IRISH, RAW, BEING HUMAN, THE WHITE QUEEN and INDIAN SUMMERS.
Model Behaviour
by Jon Brittain, performed by St Christopher’s School
A fast-paced comic, white-knuckle-ride through the rollercoaster of personal (playground) politics played out against the backdrop of the world stage.
When Mr. Smallwood announces that his Politics Year Group are going to spend an entire day role playing what it’s like to be a delegate at the United Nations, the keenest pupil in the class, Ronni is of course delighted. Everyone else in the class isn’t and (with perhaps the only exception being Sarah, who never says anything) they all quickly exhibit their contempt for the project, as they take it in turns at adopting varying degrees of cynicism. This manifests as a rainbow of negativity including: disinterest, disdain, and the desire to destroy, disrupt and to liberally undermine everything at will.
What should be one of Ronni’s most memorable days at school – a personal triumph as she displays her diplomatic and intellectual prowess, for the benefit of the whole of humanity – instead looks set on course to explode into a thermo-nuclear car crash of a day – in outer-space and cyber-space – all thanks to her typical and totally predictable classmates….who have never ever taken anything seriously in their whole lives. Apart from Sarah that is, and perhaps if people paid a little more attention to her and took the time to discover that she does actually say things, just very quietly and if Ronni could perhaps learn to follow as well as lead…..well perhaps, maybe the future could be bright – glowing with hope and not radiation.
Jon Brittain is a playwright, television writer and director. His critically acclaimed play Rotterdam premiered at Theatre503 in 2015 before transferring to Trafalgar Studios where it earned him a nomination for the Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2016. It later transferred to 59E59 in New York and the Arts Theatre in the West End. Rotterdam won an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre in 2017.
Jon went on to write and direct a series of cult hit shows; Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho and its sequel Margaret Thatcher Queen of Game Shows were sell-out staples at the Edinburgh Festival. Queen of Soho returned in summer 2021 for performances at The Garrick Theatre and in Edinburgh.
His popular musical about depression A Super Happy Story (About Feeling Super Sad) won a Fringe First Award and has toured extensively, and he is now developing it for television. He directed the Olivier Award/Fringe First Award-winning Baby Reindeer, as well as both of John Kearns’s Fosters Award winning shows Sight Gags for Perverts and Shtick. He has also directed Tom Allen, Tom Rosenthal and many other comedians. Some not called Tom.
He was a staff writer on Series 3 of The Crown for Netflix and is currently writing television and theatre and musicals – originals and adaptations. He also sometimes turns up on Twitter in disguise.
Dates & Times
- Date: Mon 24 Apr 2023Time: 19:00Book Now
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