TALENTED young Brewery actors have booked a spot at the nation’s leading youth theatre festival.

The National Theatre has announced the line-up for this year’s National Theatre Connections Festival, with the Brewery Young Actors Company representing the north west.

During the past three months ten plays have been premiered across the nation by 230 school and youth theatre companies in 26 leading regional theatres. Ten of those companies - which includes the Brewery - have been invited to perform their productions at the National on London’s South Bank.

The NT’s prestigious annual festival of new plays for young performers runs from July 2-7, with the Kendal arts centre group performing A Shop Selling Speech by Sabrina Mahfouz.

Sabrina’s play is set in a newly opened shop in Cairo, Egypt, where an armed robbery takes place.

Questions of freedom, power, gender, greed and revolution are all examined in the poet and playwright’s heightened drama.

Award-winning Sabrina is currently an associate artist at the Bush Theatre, a Global Shaper at the World Economic Forum and landed the 2013 Sky Arts Futures Fund Award for her poetry work.

Her first short play That Boy won a Westminster Prize for New Playwrights at Soho Theatre in 2010 and Traverse Theatre presented her latest play Clean at last year’s Edinburgh Festival 2013.

BYA will perform A Shop Selling Speech in NT’s Temporary Theatre (formerly known as The Shed) on July 2. The third time that a Brewery group has been selected for the prestigious festival.

In 2006 BYA director Tricia Gordon’s young charges performed Pass It On by Doug Lucie on the Cottesloe stage and in 2008 Fugee by Abi Morgan on the Olivier stage.

 

BYA recently performed Sabrina’s play at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough as part of the innovative Brewery Youth Arts programme, which has seen thousands of young people from across the region create, exhibit and perform their own work.

MORE TOP STORIES:

They explore classical and contemporary text through voice, movement and physical theatre.

Tricia said that returning to the National was again a huge honour.

She added: “We were chosen out of more than 230 school and youth theatre companies and will be the only representatives from the north west at the festival. It really underlines the Brewery’s status as a breeding ground for some of the most talented young actors in the UK.”

Tickets for the July 2 National show via its box office on 020-7452-3000 or www.nationaltheatre.org.uk.