Our New Show about Young Carers

At Theatre Hullabaloo, a child-centred approach is at the heart of everything we do; from working with the very best creative teams who specialise in making work for specific age ranges, to working with children throughout the creative process to inform the work we make. Our latest production, Tiny Treasures, is no exception and pushes this process to a whole new level.

The production, written by award winning playwright Kevin Dyer, is a collection of three short plays based on the lives and experiences of a group of young carers* and young adult carers (8-25 years) from York, called the Young Carers Revolution (YCR). The YCR provides empowerment and influence to young carers, and although administered by York Young Carers Service, the group has its own autonomy and sets its own agenda for projects and campaign themes. So far, YCR have made films, documentaries, street art and lyrics about what it is to be a young carer.

Their journey with Theatre Hullabaloo began in 2012 when a group of YCR came to see Theatre Hullabaloo's production of “Angel” at York St John University. The show really struck a chord with the young carers as it was a play about a serious subject (the unexpected friendship between a young girl and an old woman she meets with dementia) that was told in a sensitive and witty way. They decided that this would be the perfect way to share their stories with primary school children across the country and approached Theatre Hullabaloo to see if we would be keen to make a play with them - we were!

Working with Inspired Youth, who run the Young Carers Revolution, we invited YCR to come to our TakeOff Festival to see the brilliant “Mess” by Caroline Horton, a play about anorexia that we hoped would help us all to start to think about how we could address serious issues with humour and poignancy. We then ran a number of sessions asking the young people to tell us what the play should be about and together we started to create characters and potential story lines. We also played a lot of games and getting-to-know you exercises so that the creative team could understand the stories we needed to tell. Super powers and the lessons in fairy tales were things we kept going back to. YCR also worked with a brilliant illustrator called Becki Harper, who they commissioned to design the image for the show, and also chose the title - Tiny Treasures.

Stuart Mullins, the Director, has led the drama sessions with Kevin Dyer, the Writer, and two brilliant actors, Lasana and Amy, who both have the experience of being young carers. The group also have worked with Designer Bek Palmer to create mood boards for the set and costume designs and to look at set models and learn more about the process of theatre design. YCR will also have the opportunity to work with Sound Designer, Simon McCorry, to work out the sound landscape of the play.

So what is it that makes this project really exciting and unique? It's that all the creative decisions about the production are made by this group of young people; everything from informing and choosing the image for the show, to helping discover the stories and characters and even thinking about what it might look and sound like – how much more child-centred can you get? 

We all feel really privileged to be collaborating with such a brilliant bunch of young people and look forward to sharing our treasure trove of plays with schools in York and the North East in June.

Dorcas
Communications Manager, Theatre Hullabaloo

*For those of you that don't know, Young Carers are young people who help to look after someone at home. They might help to look after a brother or sister, parent or grandparent with an illness, disability, mental health problem or a problem with alcohol/drugs.