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Creating Theatre Work for a Diverse Teenage Audience

The book addresses the fact that while the UK produces high quality theatre for young audiences and there are companies and individuals writing, creating and performing specifically for this audience, it is an area that remains underdeveloped in terms of an academic and critical understanding.

The chapter addresses the teenage audience when making theatre for young audiences (TYA). This audience is in a new position of autonomy, when it comes to making its own choices about entertainment, and is therefore perhaps one of the hardest to reach audiences for theatre-makers. The chapter focuses on three examples of praxis in the context of the diverse communities of East London, each with different methodologies and forms but a shared aim to engage with that teenage audience. Mad Blud was an innovative model for verbatim theatre first produced by Theatre Royal Stratford East in 2008 in response to the rise in knife crime in the borough which exemplified the theatre's artistic philosophy of 'the continuous loop' in responding to the concerns of the community. The chapter examines the praxis of the second 'Exchange For Change' programme initiated by Chris Elwell Director of the Half Moon Young People's theatre in 2010, whose key aims are to develop emerging artists, particularly those under-represented in the sector and to create new challenging productions for the theatre for young people sector which was focused on making work for teenagers. The final project explored is Brolly’s creation of a stage adaptation of the critically-acclaimed novel for young audiences by Anna Perera, Guantanamo Boy. The production was commissioned by Stratford Circus Arts Centre that aimed to create work for a new teenage audience. The chapter examines these varied approaches to evaluate how they engage with the wider cultural imperative of making theatre work for diverse teenage audiences.