Why isn't theatre vital to youth culture?

When you’re young is when you feel most alive. You’re at the edge of things. You fall in love for the first time. You want so much, and you feel so much. It’s why our youth makes such great theatre. They live (we lived) in an unfolding, perpetual present, dreaming of the future.

It is also why young people make such great theatre audiences. When they love something it’s explosive. They tell all their friends to go. They come back for a second viewing. They fall in love.

We realised recently that we aren’t seeing as many under 25 year-olds as we’d like at the Yard

At The Yard we have a young audience – over half of our audience are between 26 and 35, markedly younger than the average age of UK theatre audiences: 52. We’re proud of that. But we realised recently that we aren’t seeing as many under 25 year-olds as we’d like. Roughly 20 per cent of our audiences are between 18 and 25.

At weekends our bar is full of people in their early twenties, dancing, at parties hosted by the brilliant Beauty and the Beat or Cliteratti or BBC AZN Network or Gal-Dem. Why aren’t they coming to the theatre? Why isn’t theatre vital to youth culture? If they live in the present then surely theatre is the perfect form to represent their experience?

That’s why we’re launching No Empty Seats, our brand new ticket scheme at The Yard, to coincide with our new show This Beautiful Future, about two young people who fall in love for the first time. No Empty Seats has a simple premise: any unsold seats to that evening’s performance can be purchased by someone 25 or under, for just £5. Just turn up 45 minutes before the show and put your name on a list.

This isn’t a box-ticking exercise, we have not been funded to introduce this scheme

In theory our scheme is unlimited: if we’ve not sold a single seat for that evening’s show, they could all go for a fiver. This isn’t a box-ticking exercise, we have not been funded to introduce this scheme. It does not have a corporate backer. This is something we believe is important. Theatre empowers, it provokes new feelings, it creates new thoughts, and at a time when the elected powers of this country are planning a future that young people did not vote for, we want to help give those people a voice.

And it’s no coincidence that we’re launching No Empty Seats with the opening of This Beautiful Future. Following two young lovers in 1944 occupied France, it reflects contemporary cultural divisions, and therefore contemporary relationships. It asks us to hope even when the outlook is bleak. It reminds us that we are learning to love all the time. It reminds us that learning to love starts with a feeling of openness, of generosity, of vulnerability. Three values that underpin No Empty Seats.

This Beautiful Future runs at the Yard Theatre until 20 May.