My experience: Aled Roberts

There was the quaint tale of a man concerned, understandably, about the consumption of his own kidneys. There was the dismemberment and consumption of a daddy-longlegs, so many have fallen in the name of friendship. There was a sexy griffin. Everything, i presumed, was going according to plan, and it was only twelve o’clock.

‘Everything’, however, took a turn for the Benny Hill when all realised we had an hour less than expected to write the titular ‘100 Words’. Though, unlike Benny Hill, it seems to have worked out for the best.

It was a bit like automatic writing. No spirits were contacted or no trances entered, but the disparity between the pieces ultimately produced seemed to suggest that between writing, cutting, counting, cutting, writing, counting, there had not been time to monitor personal psychoses.

When i went outside for coffee and fag i had a feeling i’d only had once before. I knew it straight away. A few months ago i’d re-watched ‘Spaceballs’, i had no reason to doubt it wouldn’t be the flawless comedic assault it was when i was fifteen. This is a silly analogy, but for stubbornness’s sake: if my early teens were forty five minutes in a room with other writers/teens, and the end of it all was to watch/write ‘Spaceballs’ in 100 words then … the fresh air outside the Soho that morning was something like being punched by seven intervening years. Yes.
Basically, i had the fear. I’d handed in something a bit silly with no way of changing it. It seemed funny at the time but would it to anyone else?

Perhaps it was because everyone literally ‘had to be there’, or more likely a result of the amazing fecundity that talented people under pressure can exhibit; but i was delighted with the way the eight plays came off. It was a very good thing the plays didn’t have time to be watered down, because the differences in each one were fully embraced by the team. If plays were dogs, it would have been like Bardot was … anyway …

Natasha and Oliver not only had to make everyone’s pennies worth of neurosis into something actable and then watch-able, but do it under very challenging time constraints. Especially with petulant writers making demands for things like chorus lines – probably as close as an amateur scribbler will come to 1000 brown M&M’s. For all this to happen as professionally as it did, the National Youth Theatre were a heady(?) mix of totally focussed and very energetic. The alacrity with which some difficult pieces were done is testament to their talent and … niceness.

This speed was evident in the performance which had the pace of the Royal Variety being performed after the four-minute warning. From the bare – and sometimes disturbing – bones of the morning, there was actually a show that people were watching. For the invariably nervous writers the final product perhaps seemed like some sort of necromancy. I sat in on rehearsals most of the day and, to my knowledge, Natasha, Rachael, Oliver or the NYT were not engaged in any nefarious dealings of that kind. It was tenacity and dedication to a truly brilliant project. Like Chariots of Fire, but with plays and not running.