Be part of Big Spirit

The Big Spirit Youth Theatre was founded in 1984 at the Queen Mother Theatre to offer actor training and performance opportunities to young people aged 14 to 18. Since then, Big Spirit (formerly known as the Bancroft Youth Theatre) has helped actors learn the skills of performance and many have gone on use their talents professionally.

Weekly training is given through a mixture of workshops and appearing in shows; so you are putting into practice what you learn in front of a paying audience as soon as possible. This unique approach means that virtually anyone can learn how to perform confidently and competently in a very short time. Of course, performance skills are useful for everyone, whether you are planning to become an actor or not, but we also offer opportunities to Direct, Stage Manage, costume and even write scripts. 

All Youth Theatres should be like this…

John Southland, National Theatre Director

The list of productions performed is endless, but in recent years our students have taken to the stage in Romeo and Juliet, I Don’t Like Mondays, Bat Boy, The Great Gatsby, Road, Legally Blonde, Peter Pan, Something’s Afoot, Macbeth, The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Junk. We offer a wide range of shows and plays for our students to work on, meaning they are being trained in many different theatre styles. We are most famous for our use of Physical Theatre and our Directors are passionate about teaching students to approach scripts with their own ideas – simply put, we don’t tend to follow many pre-written stage directions! 

Big Spirit have also written a number of original productions include the musical Half Moon Street which follows the fortunes of the Mazerin family and their neighbours in Half Moon Street as the bombs fall on London during the Second World War, and Runaways, which tells the story of a boy who runs away from home and lives on the streets of London.

Success at Edinburgh Fringe!

Big Spirit regularly send productions to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and have scored some notable successes over the years:

• 1992: Teechers, by John Godber
• 1996: The Drowned and the Saved, by Primo Levi
• 1997: Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
• 1998: Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
• 1999: Beautiful Thing, by Jonathan Harvey
• 2010: Junk by Melvin Burgess
• 2019: Downton Shabby by Rob Hughes
• 2022: I Don’t Like Mondays