NYT REP Company
The NYT REP provides a free intensive real-world experience each year to a group of young performers and creatives including actors, a director and designers over 9 months. Taking inspiration from the old repertory company model, the NYT REP has sought to bring its training and learning model sharply into the modern era, with the REP staging large-scale shows at professional theatres with leading industry professionals.
In 2023 National Youth Theatre celebrated 10 years of the NYT REP Company, launched in 2012 as a free alternative to drama school following the rise in tuition fees up to £9k a year
One of the only companies to stage productions the day theatres were allowed to reopen following the pandemic, the REP premiered a new production of Animal Farm at Northampton’s Royal and Derngate on 17 May 2021. Other notable productions have included the West End debut of James Graham’s Tory Boyz in 2013, the first stage adaptation of Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife at The Ambassadors Theatre in 2014, Macbeth at the Garrick Theatre which was the first production of the play in the West End to feature a female Macbeth, and a queer female-led Othello, as part of a national tour.
The company has worked with a dazzling array of creative talent including Josh Azouz, Neil Bartlett, Dzifa Benson, Ned Bennett, Moira Buffini, Lolita Chakrabarti, Miranda Cromwell, Frantic Assembly, James Graham, Tatty Hennessy, Kane Husbands, Emily Lim, Michael Morpurgo, Gbolahan Obisesan, Stephanie Street and Roy Alexander Weise.
Learning by doing it through a free industry-based audience-facing approach has been a game-changer over the last 10 years, as the REP graduates leading major shows prove.
2023 NYT REP Productions were:
- a reality TV romance remix by Debris Stevenson of Much Ado About Nothing directed by Josie Daxter at the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End,
- Bola Agbaje's Olivier Award-Winning Gone Too Far! directed by Monique Touko at Theatre Royal Stratford East
- a Queer reimagining of the Bakkhai by Maisie Newman, the receipient of the Bryan Forbes Director Bursary at our RIBA-Award-Winning Workshop Theatre.
- Scenes Through a Lens in Partnership with Digital Theatre Plus, which can be viewed via the NYT Hub
The NYT REP will return in 2024.
