The National Youth Theatre is presenting, for the first time, a season of new writing at the Finborough Theatre. Celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, the National Youth Theatre season will include three world premiere productions from 9th-27th August.
The first in the season is ‘The Fall’ written by James Fritz, who was nominated for an Olivier Award for his play ‘Four Minutes Twelve Seconds’, this production also won him the Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright.
With just hours to go until the first preview performance of The Fall, James joined us to talk about his inspiration for the play, and how working with a young cast from the National Youth Theatre turned out to be a thrilling experience.
The Fall has its first performance at the Finborough tonight, tell us what it’s about.
The Fall looks at young people and their relationship to the elderly and growing old themselves.  It takes place over the course of one lifetime and examines from where the characters are now; super-young, full of vitality and life, to where they might be in 60 years’ time. It looks at their capacity to be able to empathise with the older generation now and, also, their older selves.  The play takes us through three relatively uniformed sections to, hopefully, take the audience on a journey through that shifting relationship.
You have been working with the National Youth Theatre, so it’s a relatively young cast?
There are eight in the cast, the oldest is 24 and the youngest just turned 17, and it’s great to be exploring the subject with someone who is that young.  The cast are all so honest and enjoyable to watch on stage, I find it so interesting having all this text about older people being performed by a cast so young, it is really interesting, I think.
Did you know from the beginning you would write a play about growing older with such a young cast?
When the National Youth Theatre approached me, I thought long and hard about what it means to have eight young bodies on stage and what that does to a play, and what it does to an audience’s reading of a play. Â That was why I found the idea of old age and ageing, a really interesting one to explore.
Everything I’ve written has been filtered through the idea that they can’t help being young, beautiful, athletic and bright-eyed and it’s about me and the Director (Matthew Harrison) finding interesting ways to shift it in different directions.
What was it like working with a young group of actors?
It’s so great to work with young actors who are so excited to make something new and to make it their own, it’s been so rewarding. I can’t wait to see them perform in front of people; the cast need to see the audience’s faces, and the Finborough is so intimate they can do that.
There’s an honesty there, the whole writing and rehearsal process has been about me trying to bottle that within the three segments that make up the whole piece, in a way that lets them be themselves on stage. They’ve got buckets of talent and can take everything I’ve thrown at them, but they can’t shake that incredible honesty, and that’s what has made the play so exciting to work on.
How much of a say did you have in the casting process?
I was in on casting, but I have to trust the Directors instincts because it’s him that has to work with the cast day in and day out. We ran workshops with loads of National Youth Theatre members, and we wanted a really good mix, we’ve now got an incredible bunch of every type of young person on stage together,  and I’ve written the play based on them and their personalities. It’s been a really fun process.
Do you think that recent events make this piece more relevant than ever?
It seems like a really crucial time.  By the time my generation get to their eighties, there are going to be so many more people of that age. People are getting older and older but staying healthier and healthier, while the welfare system is slowly shrinking and will probably continue to shrink over the course of our lives.  There are people not even getting the chance to save for their retirement, usually some wealth and property would trickle down through inheritance, but most of that could now be used up to pay for home care. It feels like a ticking time bomb that nobody wants to look too closely at.
For a young cast, it’s been about exploring how tough it might be for them. It’s an odd thing for that generation because the future is so uncertain, the last couple of months have shown how the sands keep shifting from underneath them, how can you plan for a comfortable retirement when you’ve no idea what the world is going to look like when you get there?
In Four Minutes Twelve Seconds which was staged at Trafalgar Studios last year, you seemed to capture the essence of youth perfectly in the character, Cara. How have you captured that again in The Fall?
It’s a slightly different beast in that the cast are so young, but the text is kind of working against them. So it’s more about filtering their potential futures rather than looking at who they are now, I was lucky that the cast did a lot of the hard work for me, and brought the language of youth with them.
In Four Minutes Twelve Seconds, every scene seemed to take the audience in a different direction and was constantly changing perceptions. Does The Fall follow a similar structure?
It’s very different in form; Four Minutes Twelve Seconds was almost like a detective thriller with the Mum playing the detective. The Fall is a bit more experimental in structure, some moments are similar in terms of those reveals of information, and what it does to people and what finding out things about each other can do to your relationships.  But it’s very different regarding what it does and how it does it, so it should be a very different experience for the audience.
What would you like the audience to be thinking as they leave the theatre?
It’s a 100 seater venue, and I hope that means 100 different readings of the play that leave each night.  But I hope, maybe, there will be more of a connection made between the younger generation and what’s waiting for them in old age, and also the link between who we are when we are twenty and, essentially being the same person at eighty, but looking and feeling really different.  I’m really interested in what the audience will think.
The Fall will run at the Finborough Theatre until August 13th. It will be followed by Bitches (16th – 20th August) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (23rd – 27th August).
