'Gulliver's Travels' takes Youth Theatre to Dublin and Cork

The National Youth Theatre returns this week with an adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

The show opens tonight in the Peacock (the Abbey Theatre’s second stage) before transferring to the Everyman, Cork next week. Significantly, it is the 30th anniversary of the event, which — since staging Paul Thompson’s By Common Consent in 1983 — has showcased the very best in Irish youth theatre.

The National Youth Theatre is just one initiative run by the National Association for Youth Drama (NAYD), an organisation that has helped develop over 60 youth theatre groups around the country, catering for over 3,000 young people involved in them. The 16 actors in the show are selected following auditions in youth theatres nationwide. Once chosen, the youngsters spend the final four weeks of the summer rehearsing the show in Dublin, before the curtain finally raises in the National Theatre.