Edinburgh beckons for Chichester Festival Youth Theatre duo
After months of planning and preparation, it's very nearly here.
Chichester Festival Youth Theatre members Evelina Rudasa and Kitty Peirson have written a play which they are taking to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
They have got a slot for Why Won’t They Eat the Cake at theSpace on the Mile from August 18-23, a trip towards which they have managed to raise £4,500 to cover the cost of it all.
Kitty, aged 17, a student at Seaford College, said: “We will be in Edinburgh for eight days and it just feels really crazy. We started this nine months ago and now we're going to Edinburgh. It's just so weird. When you get your place at the Edinburgh Fringe you can't really process it until people start buying tickets for the show, and now we've done it: we have actually made a show!”
Evelina, aged 17, who lives in Chichester and is a student at Northbrook College, is delighted precisely because, as she says, the show is very “authentically us”: “And that has been a big part of it, and I think that's the reason we enjoy it so much. When you go to the theatre you might think this is brilliant or maybe it's not for you but I never thought we would actually be making our own show. It feels so crazy but in a way it does also make you feel quite vulnerable. You're putting yourself on stage and it's something you've worked so long for. It's scary but it's also exciting. It's a lot of emotions.”
Kitty added: “We were talking about what it would be like when it's over. It's a never-ending stream of work. It's like having seven full-time jobs that you're working on as well as doing schoolwork and extra-curricular and just having a life. It is going to be weird to just go back to being a normal teenager again! But I know there will be the itch to do all over again afterwards. But I've got my A levels next year and I know that I need to make good decisions!”
Evelina explains: “It began when Kitty was in her drama class and they offered just as a little idea if people wanted to write something to take to the Edinburgh Fringe. Kitty messaged me immediately and said ‘Evelina, do you want to write a play?’ I said yes absolutely so we just sat down with a shared doc and started writing.”
As Kitty says, they had no idea where it was going to go when they started: “We had no plan but we just kept on writing and writing.
“It's about two girls and it is the morning after one of their birthday parties. These girls just sit there and dissect everything that happened but simultaneously they dissect their lives. We started off as the characters and started off writing about what it feels like to be in the modern world. There are parts of both these characters in our lives but officially they don't have names. They are girl and girl 2".
Evelina added: “I'm girl. And you can definitely say she is problematic as a character. To be honest we're using this character to show different life experiences. We keep the qualities that would apply to anybody but the demographic is basically ours. And they both talk about the kinds of things that regular teenagers would talk about and battle with. We cover grief and we cover emotional neglect.”
Kitty added: “And we cover eating disorders a little bit. And we cover trauma as a generalised topic but we're not trying to write about the topics, to write a play about grief or about eating disorders. Really it is just part of people's lives without necessarily having a central place in them. But they are not our lives. They are not our experiences. They are things that people can relate to. We are just trying to comment on how everybody struggles with the things that we are talking about.”