Guest Post: Director Steven Kavuma On Black Boyhood, Isolation Rooms And Bringing CLASSROOM CHRONICLES To The National Youth Theatre

These boys can sing, act and dance. I'm not jealous at all. Actually, I am. I am VERY jealous. I wish I was these boys when I was 17.

I wish I'd had the room they get to walk into as actors. Four young Black men being told, from the first rehearsal, that the funny, soft, unfinished parts of them are the whole point, not something to grow out of. I didn't know that was on offer when I was young. You worked out which version of yourself got you through the school day, you led with that, and you kept the rest for the walk home. Watching them at work is like watching athletes: the repetition, the discipline, the willingness to go again, and then the generosity of offering themselves to it every time. It is a blessing to direct this company, and it's also a bit of a reckoning.

The play is about four Black boys in isolation at school. While they're in there they get to know each other, work out who each of them is and why they're there, and become best friends. The isolation room is designed to remove you out of the lesson, away from your mates, while the day carries on without you. Black Caribbean and African boys are still among the most excluded groups in English schools, and usually that statistic is where the story starts and ends. Classroom Chronicles sets it aside and turns the cold punishment room into a place of warmth, refuge, comedy and self-invention.

It's a play about friendship, about Black boyhood, about growing up, and about Black boy joy. Because I don't think we get to see enough stories where Black boys are just allowed to be. Allowed to imagine, allowed to play, allowed to be funny, as opposed to the stereotypical stories we keep getting handed.

Rehearsals have been something really special. Collaborating on this so closely with Lorraine Woodley-Bitmead as movement director and co-dramaturg is a dream: she's amazing, she's so detailed in her offers - I’m learning so much working with her. What Ty Lowe is doing with the singing has opened the whole thing up - first time I heard Ty working with the boys on the music, I literally got chills. Maame Atuah is styling them with a care these characters rarely get, Marie Zschommler's sound puts you inside their heads, and Jodi Rabinowitz is lighting a room that's meant to feel like nowhere.

Everyone is adding their own touch, which is the best thing a director gets to watch. Working with Kickers has been a dream too, there's something right about a brand that's been on the feet of British schoolkids for decades getting behind a play set in a school, and behind these boys.

We have one night. I want people to laugh a lot, and then clock what they're laughing at: four young Black men being soft, silly, scared and entirely themselves in the one room in the building where they were sent to be nobody. Theatre can't undo an exclusion figure. But for eighty minutes it can put four whole people in front of a room of strangers and let them be seen properly, and I'd have given a lot to see that at 17.

Classroom Chronicles is devised by the company and directed and co-dramaturged by Steven Kavuma, with collaborator, movement director and co-dramaturge Lorraine Woodley-Bitmead, musical director Ty Lowe, Costume Designer and stylist Maame Atuah, sound designer Marie Zschommler, lighting designer Jodi Rabinowitz, producer Ope Sowande and co-producer Moesha Francis.

Classroom Chronicles plays the National Youth Theatre on 29 October at 7pm, for one night only. Tickets are £5