Drama Students Perform at Youth Crime Conference

Drama and Applied Theatre students at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham recently took part in the Richmond Youth Crime Conference to help raise awareness of crime and safety with local school children. The annual event, organised by Richmond Police, saw more than 150 pupils from 15 schools experience a mixture of drama, workshops and presentations about current community safety issues. Drama St Mary’s has been involved in the conference for the last four years and uses interactive forum theatre to get young people thinking about crime and its consequences. The students’ performance depicted a young person who had become involved in knife crime and, using forum theatre performance style, they allowed children in the audience to join in, improvise and ultimately change the outcome of the story. Programme Director Patsy Burn commented, “The Youth Crime Conference is a great event and we are thrilled to have been invited back to perform for the fourth year running. Forum theatre is very interactive so is a great way to engage young people with the topic of crime and everyone that took part really enjoyed altering the outcome of the play. “Each year we also offer follow up workshops to schools directly and are really looking forward to working with teachers and pupils this year to further develop their awareness of crime and safety in the community.” For more information about Drama St Mary’s work within the community, please contact Patsy Burn on patsy.burn@stmarys.ac.uk