NYT Blog: Stepping Out

After emerging from our safety cocoon, we have been thrust into the public, our new best friend. Albeit, the fortnight of previews predominantly consisted of our mums and their mates, they were still paying victims forking over to be entertained in the West End. The NYT REP have racked up a cacophony of cock-ups during previews:

1. After three months of not having an audience, try not to have a stroke when hearing the audience titter, gasp, or cough. Or indeed, when discovering that there is an audience at all.

2. Ensure all buttons, clasps and zips are securely fastened. Even in the quickest of changes, make sure it is the lovely costume ladies who buckle you in. Otherwise, Lady Macbeth is left giving a skirt-less burlesque performance in front of a gaggle of GCSE boys.

3. Try to reduce your eyes to the actual size of your stomach. Just because Covent Garden is riddled with delicious treats, a flapjack the size of a fridge isn’t the most mobile choice before a rigorous WW1 movement sequence.

4. When playing a dead soldier in a pre-set that is half an hour long for Private Peaceful, do not position yourself in close proximity to the haze machine. Emerging after thirty minutes of haze-in-the-face is the equivalent of waking up in an ash cloud, on Bonfire Night.

5. Once the boys have battled with adhesives to fixate fake hipster beards for Selfie, Spartan impressions are more than welcome. Touching the beards before they dry with Dorito stained fingers, not welcome.

6. Upon spotting a Game of Thrones actor in the audience, try not to intensify and triple the length of any of the twenty deaths that happen across the three productions.

7. Don’t have your gun in your hand for curtain call.

The NYT Rep Company’s Season featuring SELFIE, Private Peaceful and Macbeth runs until 28th November at Ambassadors Theatre and is on sale now.

For more from the National Youth Theatre and to book tickets head over to the NYT page.