“I didn’t know what to expect with APPLES my theatre trips normally involve jazz hands, over priced ice cream and my Grandma Ethel. I don’t know what Ethel would have thought, but I was loving it and actually felt like something clicked ‘this is what theatre’s all about!’

After around an hour I remembered that I and the world existed (only due to a hard chair and not a break in the splendid grip the cast had on me) and I suddenly realised how much I absolutely hated ‘Gary’. Surely this only happens when something is done so powerfully and plausibly. He was the guy I was wary of at drunken Under 18’s parties he was the one who always seemed to sit beside me on the Metro!

Adam however stole my heart; a ‘Brutalist’s’ Adrian Mole made me laugh and empathise with. However he was no undemanding light relief, making me perch on the edge of my wooden chair till the very end.

‘APPLES’ finally breaks the cliché chain representation of a teenager and at that a northern one too!”

Beautiful decoration in the Rosehill Theatre foyer

Here are some brilliant images from the Rosehill Theatre in Whitehaven.  An extremely talented and dedicated group of young people from the Whitehaven community  decorated the Rosehill foyer and theatre bar for APPLES.    

Rosehill theatre bar after APPLES

 Northern Stage and Company of Angels would like to say a huge thank you to everybody at the Rosehill Theatre who helped create such an amazing atmosphere.

After the show there was an excellent DJ set by Tom Salmon (pictured). make sure you don’t miss live DJ sets every Wednesday and Friday evening in Northern Stage’s foyer and bar when APPLES is on in Newcastle.

DJ set in the bar after the show

Latitude 2010

I’m Amy, Communications Officer at Northern Stage and have been helping promote APPLES on its national tour.  Neither Company of Angels nor Northern Stage have taken a show to Latitude before and I was lucky enough to go along too with the APPLES cast and crew.  Latitude is a huge culture festival that takes place in Southwold in Suffolk.  The festival has a great line up of music, theatre, cabaret, comedy, poetry, dance, literature and probably a few other genres that I’ve forgotten.  This year was Latitude’s 5th birthday and it was great to have our show on the same bill the Lyric Hammersmith and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

I hadn’t seen APPLES since its opening night at the Middlesbrough Empire in June and it was amazing to see that the show still had the same incredible energy after a long national tour (which is still continuing).  Below is a great shot of people queuing to get into the theatre tent to see APPLES.

The queue for APPLES at Latitude

To fit the time slots at Latitude APPLES had been slightly shortened but was perfect for the festival audience.  Fast paced, hilarious and with the best choreographed fight scene I have ever seen, the show went down a storm.  I had forgotten how much I loved the music in APPLES and how brilliantly it captures the mood of the show.

Throughout the tour there have been people from Middlesbrough in the audience and the same happened at Latitude.  I was sat next to two women from Teesside who laughed hysterically at every single Boro reference and seemed totally thrilled to be watching a show about their home town in the middle of a field in East Anglia! Now I can’t wait to see APPLES in Edinburgh to see if we get any Teessiders up there too.

Richard Milward’s novel APPLES was published in April 2007 and received rave reviews from every section of the press. Since then, it has also been translated and published in Holland, Italy, Germany, France, Romania and Spain and recently brought out in America.

APPLES is about sex and the city when you’re 15.

Set in his home town of Middlesborough, Richard calls APPLES, ‘an anti-macho fairy story’. The book is poetic, graphic and comic. The author filters everything through his own colour wheel and what is grotty or banal is transformed through the eyes of his characters. When I first read the book, the originality of his voice made me long to hear it spoken aloud.

Richard finished writing APPLES when he was 20 and posted it to Faber and Faber. They published it the following year. He is now 25 years old and has just graduated from Byam Shaw at Central St. Martins in Fine Art and published his second novel TEN STOREY LOVE SONG.
For me, this is a story about young people who are bringing themselves up. For different reasons, they have to make up their own lives. I sent a version of this adaptation to Erica Whyman at Northern Stage in late 2008 and her company funded a week-long workshop in March 2009. As a result of a successful bid to the Arts Council for touring money, Company of Angels and Northern Stage have been able to co-produce APPLES and to tour the country with it. I want to thank Erica and her staff at Northern Stage very warmly for
making this possible.

John Retallack – Director, Company of Angels

Wow! It’s the fourth week of rehearsals and we open next week! I’m not sure where time has gone.

Forgive me as I try to sum up the last, hectic, three weeks in a quick post. I’m Jo, one of the Associate Producers on Apples. I work at Northern Stage and have been involved with the show since we first started work on it. It has been a long time in the making; John (Retallack, the adaptor and director) first read the book when it first came out in 2007 and knew then that he wanted to turn it into a play. He started working on the script and then asked us, because we’re the largest producing theatre in the North East, if we wanted to be involved. We did, as loads of us here had read the book and already fallen in love with Richard’s mystical, poetic, gorgeous language. So we did a weeks work-in-progress in March 2009, then we wrote an application to the Arts Council to support the tour (no mean feat, I think it got to 17 drafts and then I stopped counting!). And in December we got the ok from them and began planning in earnest.

Perhaps the most exciting thing for us was when we got the Empire in Middlesbrough to agree to host the premiere – it’s such a gorgeous venue and as it is mentioned in the book it seemed daft not to try and get them on board. Plus, it was originally a theatre. I love the story that this nightclub, that used to be a theatre is being turned back into a theatre to tell the story of teenagers in a nightclub! It’s going to some really good venues on tour too, so it’s obvious that whilst Adam, Eve, Claire, Gary, Debbie, Burny etc are Boro born and bred, these teenagers can be found everywhere.

It’s been a pretty intense three weeks so far. The director, designer and choreographer had done loads of preparation work ahead of starting rehearsals on 4th May, but you can never really tell how things work till you get into the room and start making it. It was brilliant on the first day to see all of the 6 cast members together, and to hear them do a read through. It brought it all home that we were actually going to make this happen. During the following week things got chopped and changed; Therase had her hair dyed blonde (she didn’t love it to start with, but I think she’s got used to it now) and Louie had his shaved off, the set started to arrive and props were made. Music was chosen [check out the playlist here] and costumes tweaked (Jade’s pregnancy costume is apparently very hot under her school uniform!)

So now we are gearing up to move down to Middlesbrough next Tuesday and take over the Empire. Book your tickets!