Young Voices, Punk Rock, and Warhorse.

This week I finished the Young Voices project I have been working on for Nottingham Playhouse. The seven plays the children had written were linked together to form a narrative about three children who meet, fall out and play together on a piece of waste ground. The youngest writers were top infants, the oldest top juniors. The writers were invited in for the dress rehearsal which was also watched by Club Encore the Playhouse over 50 group. It was good to see the adults wanting to talk to the kids about their work, and the surprise on the kid's faces when they realised we meant what we said when we told them their work would be performed on a real set, with specially composed music and real live actors. It was a long project, frustrating at times - organising anything involving seven different schools is bound to be fraught - but ultimately, I think we got it right for the kids.
The same night I went to see Garage Band Andy Barrett's new play about a group of 40/50 somethings who try to recover their lost punk youth. I can't remember when I've seen four actors having so much fun.
The one piece of theatre that's stuck with me since I saw it a couple of weeks ago is Warhorse. We nearly went one Sunday afternoon in November when it was on at the National, and they had some returns. I actually had the tickets in my hand when I sensed something wasn't right. I turned round, saw my wife's wobbly lip and handed the tickets back unbought.
We'd recently been to see John Tams, who did the music for the show, and he played a couple of the songs explaining the context so movingly and singing them so beautifully that there was hardly a dry eye in the place when he'd finished - Anne's included. And mine, a bit.
Since that Sunday when we had to return the tickets she read the novel and the play text and finally decided she was ready to go a see a play where horses die.
She was a little watery as she read the programme and we couldn't leave our seats at the interval but she survived and she's now able to talk about it without bringing on an emotional crisis. I don't get easily affected by cheap emotion, but this wasn't cheap emotion so I had tears on my face almost continuously from beginning to end and there are moments it's not safe to dwell on even now, three weeks later.
I keep thinking about it because it is like nothing else I've seen. True the story gets a bit lost, it takes a while to get going, because of the size of the horses the actors are literally left on the periphery most of the time, and it's all a bit shouty, but I bought every minute of it. A friend asked me if the horses spoke and they don't, but they are so eloquent they might as well have voices. I have no idea how they did it but I believed every moment and at the end all I wanted to do was to go and give them a pat and an apple.