Celebration of theatrical training show
Frantic Assembly’s The Unreturning marks the 10th anniversary of the company’s award-winning Ignition training programme.
All four members of the cast were part of the Ignition programme before they went on totrainprofessionallyandpursue acting careers – a programme performer Jared Garfield was delighted to be part of.
He joined it for its second year. Now he is finally making his full-production debut with the company as it heads to Chichester’s Minerva Theatre (February 5-9). The work is set in a British northern coastal town. Three young men are coming home from war. Their stories, set at different times over the past 100 years, are interwoven in a new play featuring Frantic’s celebrated physicality.
For Jared, it’s a story which started in 2009: “I believe I was in the second year of the programme. I heard about it through a family friend of my mum who did some work at the National Theatre for the education side of things. She told my mum about it. At the time I was doing a bit of acting and a bit of movement, and she heard about this and thought of me. I was 17 at the time.”
Ignition is Frantic Assembly’s free, national training programme for young men aged 16-20. The programme seeks out talent in unexpected places, from sports groups to youth centres, and is committed to helping young men find their strength.
“I went along to a taster session and at the end of the session they told us about the programme called Ignition and said we could audition if we wanted. They went through a lot of different exercises and techniques to devise work. I went and auditioned shortly afterwards and was accepted and it was great. I went on the course. It was really good. It was a weeklong course. We spent Monday to Friday preparing for the show on the Friday. We developed a show in a week, but it was pretty much four days because on the fifth day we were tech’ing and getting ready. It was very intense. By the end of it, you really felt that you had done a whole term’s work.
“But by the end of the week, I couldn’t believe what we had achieved. You learn the right mechanisms, but you also learn the process and you learn that you can create work quickly, that you can actually produce really good work quickly. They teach you to have the courage not to overthink things, just to dive in. In any creative process, we all have the tendency to overthink, to worry but really you just need to trust the process – and that is what they teach you to do.”