We have been developing the When This Is Over project since the summer of 2020.
Along the way, we’ve collaborated with more than fifty other youth theatres and won Community Project of the Year Award at the Stage Awards. But we still haven’t performed the play …
When This Is Over began life as part of the Coronavirus Time Capsule, our online project that united more than 3,000 teenagers in 17 different countries during lockdown. It was the title of a video anticipating all the things that young people were looking forward to, and hoping for, at the end of the pandemic.
That summer the first lockdown finished and we ran our first in-person work since the beginning of the pandemic. In socially distanced rooms, with everyone sitting in marked up boxes on the floor to prevent them from being too close, we started to create new work. Love, one of the eventual WTIO cast members, wrote a eulogy for herself that imagined her life lived out in infinite parallel universes.
We used Love’s writing as a starting point for a new play. Inspired by our exchange with hundreds of youth theatres on the Time Capsule project, we opened up our process, working with an initial cohort of sixteen other youth theatres to develop the play.
Alongside these collaborations we worked with artists and campaigners like Inua Ellams and Letters to the Earth in ‘gatherings’, large online meetings of up to 100 young people, all collaborating digitally to make new work. Here are some of the pieces we created:
Eventually, we used our experience of this collaboration to create a blueprint that enabled fifty other youth theatres to develop their own version of When This Is Over. Everyone performed in the autumn of 2021. Except us. Because, as we all knew – it wasn’t over. Covid had come back with a vengeance and when three of us tested positive during technical rehearsals at the Unicorn Theatre in October 2021, we were forced to cancel.
Two weeks later we staged a rehearsed reading of the play at the National Youth Theatre, a chance at last to see the play run from beginning to end.
We are delighted now to be able to finally produce the show at the Yard Theatre in November 2022. Five of the original cast remain and they will carry two years of development, collaboration and growth into the final production. We can’t wait to see you there.
– Company Three
www.companythree.co.uk