This year the National Student Drama Festival (NSDF) produced 16 new pieces -- most of them conceived, made and performed by people who have still never met. Theatre-making is always an act of faith. To do it this year has required believing in and then implementing a series of evolving miracles. It’s the 65th NSDF, sponsored by The Sunday Times since its inception in 1956, and none before it has shown more clearly the resilience and innovation of young people.
This time last year NSDF had produced the first fully online UK festival of the Covid era, just two weeks after the first lockdown. It was a white-knuckle ride that became a huge success, with 10,000 attendees. Suddenly big organisations were asking us for advice. But this was Dunkirk, not D-Day; a necessary retreat repackaged as a triumph, because we had not been able to produce work. Masterclasses and workshops are great — and this year our leaders included Tamsin Greig, Clint Dyer, Phyllida Lloyd, Giles Terera, Josh O’Connor, Rory Kinnear, Simon Godwin, Katy Brand and Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures. But without new work the conversation that is our culture will slowly hush to silence.
It was obvious a long winter was coming for the industry. At NSDF we decided new voices would be the birdsong to let us know spring had arrived. But how do you present work when the artists are in lockdown, when colleges and universities are shuttered?
We started to build an army before we knew where we’d march it. For the first time we became a production company rather than a receiving house, under the banner NSDF Creates.
First, we brought together 22 brilliant young theatre-makers from across the UK to form NSDF Lab. They worked via Zoom, mentored by our associates, to create five pieces showcased at the festival. Their work was varied and terrific, but most moving was watching them making tentative post-festival plans to meet. For a year they’ve shared their lives, but have yet to share a drink.
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Alongside the Lab we partnered with theatre companies and educational institutions to make new work. Working online has meant adapting every part of the process, and the madcap snakes and ladders of the pandemic has forced production plans to be constantly cast aside. We had to circumnavigate even greater barriers: many of the audience we want to reach most watch on their phones, not on high-end laptops, so we banned any software that didn’t work on a smartphone. And we ring-fenced cash to make the festival as accessible as possible to deaf and disabled participants — a fantastic effort led by Nicola Miles-Wildin and Chloë Clarke.
Everything was online at NSDF 21. The digital revolution in theatre has prompted work of breadth and innovation. Stella Green’s You Will See Everything is a poetic work of great, precise power. Elegantly designed by Freddie Cotton with cinematography by Mikey Sneddon, it showed the possibilities inherent in digital hybrid work. Jigsaw, from Pound of Flesh, explores Molly Parker’s experience growing up with autistic brothers. Beautifully played, shot and threaded through with original music, it is profoundly moving, as caring to its subjects as to its audience.
NSDF 21 was a festival of change and of demands for change. Seen, which we produced in conjunction with NewVic Sixth Form College, was remarkable: a work of anger, revelation and joy. A piece drawn from the reality of the students’ lives in Newham, east London — a scene of stop and search featuring the brilliant Moses Oridoye was drawn from his own life — Seen is a powerful manifesto, raw and from the heart. Big Creative Academy from Walthamstow, east London, made Beneath the Surface, again mentored as part of NSDF Creates. Using Zoom as an artistic mechanism rather than an impediment, it is a work of stark authenticity, played with poise and elegant simplicity.
NSDF also commissioned two short films made by 14 young artists. Genre-spanning and drawn from across the UK, they showed a generation escaping the pandemic with dark wit, invention and stoicism. The first described life in lockdown; the second their hopes and dreams for the life after.
NSDF 21 made one thing clear: our industry faces a moment of radical possibility. We still have gatekeepers, but the walls are falling down. We can choose to build the old ones back or we can use the freshly found common ground to make greater pasture.
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NSDF associate Nima Taleghani chaired a panel asking: “Is theatre shit?” Sounds tabloid — in fact, it was furious and forensic. Who really has access to our theatre buildings and our industry? How do we treat our freelancers? Are we really going to build back better, or scrabble to reinstitute a model that wasn’t working even before the crisis?
NSDF will never turn away from the power of live performance shared in a communal space, but the digital world widens access and increases oppor-tunity. We had participants from more than 40 countries this year; more crucially, we had participants from our own country whom we would never have been able to reach without the digital revolution the pandemic has forced.
So on the last day of the festival we launched NSDF Hub: a year-round, curated online space where young people will get their work seen. Like everything at our new NSDF, it will be free and open to all. I think there is change coming in the arts. It won’t trickle down from the top; it will erupt from below. And that really will feel like spring arriving.
All NSDF 21 shows, masterclasses and panels, as well as work from the festival magazine, Noises Off, are available for free at nsdf.org.uk