After the huge success of Brainstorm, their youth-theatre play about the workings of the adolescent brain, pioneering theatre group Company Three are back with another brilliant play for young people: When This Is Over, a celebration of hope and imagination in a time of chaos. Conceived by the company between COVID lockdowns, and originally performed by youth groups across the country, it went on to win Community Project of the Year at the Stage Awards, and Outstanding Drama Initiative at the Music and Drama Education Awards.

Published this week as a resource for other youth-theatre companies to use in creating their own version of the show – and with the performing rights immediately released for companies to do just that – When This Is Over is a uniquely adaptable blueprint for theatrical adventure. Here, Company Three’s Artistic Director NED GLASIER explains how the play was originally conceived, and how it puts young people’s lives centre stage…

Do you remember that time in the summer of 2020 when we were allowed to see each other in person again? Those first moments of seeing people in the flesh who you hadn’t seen since March.

I remember.

I remember standing at the door of the hall in Islington where Company Three was holding its first sessions after lockdown, wearing a mask, welcoming back the young people we hadn’t seen for five months. I remember how much taller some of them were, how their faces had changed, as teenagers’ faces do, so quickly.

I remember Love Ọmọlọla. We hadn’t seen her much on Zoom and when she came into the workshop space – which was marked out in squares of white tape to keep people safely distanced – she told us this all felt like a parallel universe. Like we were all suddenly living in another dimension, while our real selves were continuing their lives elsewhere, uninterrupted by Covid.

We knew then that we needed to make a play that would help young people articulate this feeling of disrupted time and explore the chance events that led us into lockdown and a new world. Love even provided the perfect starting point – she wrote a kind of eulogy imagining all the lives she might have led, and indeed might still go on to lead. All the versions of herself that she might become.

Love’s ability to articulate her sense of dislocation inspired When This Is Over. As we developed the idea and turned it into a play, with a committed and inspiring group of young people and alongside other brilliant groups of young people across the country, the world was in turmoil. ‘Problems on top of problems,’ said Allegresse, another member of our group.

We realised that in order to understand the present, we needed to tell complete stories. Whole-life stories, from birth to death. Lives that had been knocked off course by Covid and sent spiralling into a different future. A future that contained climate emergency and all sorts of other fears. It sounds bleak, but in fact it was anything but. It was joyful. The more we traced the stories of the five young people who made the play, the more we discovered the joy of their connectedness. Hope kept popping up in every moment of their friendship, their support for each other.

When we thought about the chance events that had so disrupted our lives, we understood too that the only reason we were all together, belly-laughing in a rehearsal room, was because we’d been led there by a million other chance events going right back to the beginning of time.

So When This Is Over became a play about chance, and chaos, and how important it is to work with those things, rather than to pretend they don’t exist. If Covid taught us anything, it was that (contrary to what the education system seems to suggest) there is no straight path – there is only an ever-shifting landscape that requires flexibility, imagination and connection.

In the middle of When This Is Over, the cast’s ability to tell their story comes to a sudden, unexpected halt. This is because they’ve reached the present moment, and no-one knows what’s going to happen next. It is in this moment that they invite the audience to imagine with them. To imagine their future together and, in doing so, to carry the idea of that future with them when they leave the theatre – changed, forever, in some way.

The thought that, by publishing a Blueprint of When This Is Over, we’re enabling thousands of other adults to sit with young people and imagine the future together feels profoundly hopeful. We’re really excited to see how other young companies and school groups respond to the prompts we’ve given – and what they make as a result. Another series of chance events, spooling out ahead of us, and all because Love came back into our room and talked about parallel universes.

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From the Nick Hern Books Performing Rights Manager, Tamara von Werthern…

When This is Over is a brilliant play for youth groups to perform, and I’m sure it will be performed widely. It is in a similar vein to Company Three’s previous show Brainstorm, which dealt with the fascinating changes that occur in teenager’s brains during adolescence and the knock-on effects this has on their everyday lives. This new play deals with imagined futures, and the hope that comes from collective creative imagining. Future is a word weighted with fear as well as excitement and hope for young people today, and it is so important to have these conversations with them about their future that goes well beyond academic achievement. By performing When This Is Over you are allowing both the young people performing and their audiences to imagine their place in the world, their role in it and their potential.

The published edition of When This Is Over includes not only the full text of Company Three’s original production, but a set of exercises and ideas on how to approach the rehearsal and creative process with your group, to help you create your own unique production, drawing on contributions from your cast.

There are more details about When This Is Over on our Plays to Perform website here, where you can also apply for performing rights. The Performing Rights team at Nick Hern Books is always on hand to answer any questions you might have, and to help you make your production a real success!

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When This Is Over: A Blueprint for Creating Your Own Production, and the Original Playscript by Ned Glasier, Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and Company Three is out now. Save 20% when you order your copy directly from our website here.

The published edition contains a series of exercises and activities for schools, youth-theatre groups and community companies to create and perform their own unique productions, and also features the complete script of Company Three’s version, which was performed at The Yard, London, in 2022.

Related blog post: Ned Glasier and Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore on Company’s Three’s play Brainstorm.