What's happening at YTYT

Lovely Toni has blogged about Macbeth... On Sunday afternoon, Black Company performed their full length Shakespeare, Macbeth, in the Calder at the Hepworth. For those unfamiliar with the space, this is the bottom floor of an old mill by the waterfront just next to the Hepworth playground. It’s hard to imagine that Yew Tree could pick a better setting. The stage was set against the back wall with the windows blacked out, other than the ones right behind the stage allowing three beams of light to flood into the room setting a dark and authentic tone. This also created silhouettes of the actors throughout the play, fitting to the eeriness of the witches and adding to the haunting nature of the cold blooded murders in the play. Barring the Romeo and Juliet film with Leonardo DiCaprio, I’d never seen a full length Shakespeare tragedy (despite studying Lady Macbeth for GCSE English). This was mainly because I’d stereotyped them as being harder to follow and a bit duller than comedies but

Lucy played Lady Macbeth brilliantly in our recent production and she's blogged about the experience... So as most of you know Black Company have just finished doing Macbeth, and I know I'm biased but honestly we absolutely smashed it! We started back in January with a workshop/audition session where if we wanted to be considered for Lady Macbeth or Macbeth we had to learn one of their speeches. I decided to throw myself in at the deep end and learn the monologue for Lady Macbeth, not thinking by any stretch of the imagination that I'd actually get it, but by some miracle I managed it, and to say I underestimated what a challenge that role would be is a massive understatement. Lady Macbeth goes on such a journey through the play and the difference between the manipulative, hard as nails woman you see at the beginning and the broken and defeated woman she is after her decent into madness is huge. And I'm pretty sure my first few attempts at portraying that were pre

Ellie has blogged about Bassett For the last few months gold company have been been rehearsing and putting together a show called Bassett, a past connections show. It's a show about some year 11 students who have been locked in a classroom by their citizenship teacher and one particular student, Leo, takes it much more harshly than the rest and ends up spray painting a wall and piling people on top of each other. Rehearsal wise we started off the first few weeks preparing the short 10 minute opening of it for the 21st of may, we made sure it was a strong audience worthy show and it definitely payed off, after the showcase on the 21st we started to focus on later parts of the play, creating the right atmosphere and building the characters. Thinking about action and reaction, feeling the emotion rather than just doing the emotion and it definitely built the show and made it much stronger, this also helped us create the right feel for the ending- where Leo goes nuts. After mont