A large part of York Castle Museum’s HLF funded ‘Changing Spaces’ project is the Learning and Activity Programme, which runs 2014-2018. The project’s latest achievement is ‘Forward to Victory’, a youth theatre production working with the York Theatre Royal. Lucy Knock, Assistant Curator of Social History (Informal Learning), tells us more in this blog entry.

The Changing Spaces project aims to engage visitors with the Debtors’ Prison Building and our First World War collections here at the York Castle Museum, representing stories in innovative and inspiring ways and to new audiences.

Working together with Kate Veysey (Youth Theatre Director at York Theatre Royal), we planned to focus on the Home Front during the period of the First World War and work with the theatre’s established youth group of 14-16 year olds.

We decided to use our reconstructed Victorian Street Kirkgate as the performance space, and looked for a writer to create an original play using stories from our collections. Rachel Barnett was selected from a large group of interest writers, creating an original ensemble play entitled ‘Forward to Victory’ for us to be performed on three nights by three separate groups of young people.

The play is set in Easter 1917 and follows the story of five boys called Tommy through a series of set pieces at different locations on Kirkgate. There were roughly 25 young performers in each production, all aged between 14 and 16.

As part of her research, Rachel visited the Castle Museum and worked with the History and Learning Teams exploring our collections and archive material. She told us that she thoroughly enjoyed this part of the project, and it certainly meant that the final piece felt authentic during the performances.

As part of the project, we were also able to commission local film makers Digifish to create a ‘behind-the scenes’ documentary film focusing on how the play came together using snippets of performance, audience reaction and rehearsal footage. It is being edited as we speak and we are really looking forward to seeing the final cut!

Thank you to staff and volunteers who came along to be ‘practice’ audience members – this really helped the young people prepare for the ticketed performances later in the week – and of course to everyone who came to see the final performances. We hope you enjoyed it!

The whole project was a great collaborative effort from many different teams within York Museums Trust and the York Theatre Royal. Thank you very much to the Castle Museum Welcome Team, the History Team, Health and Safety Advisor Andy Waller, and especially to our former Learning Manager Emma King. Huge thanks to Julian Olive, Kate Veysey and all the team at the theatre, writer Rachel Barnett, and finally and most importantly, thank you to the fabulous and talented members of the Youth Theatre itself. Well done!