A look at recent ADC Theatre programming will show you a variety of classics, faithfully directed and in dialogue with recent commercial successes in London and New York, such as The Seagull, Sunday in the Park with George, Indecent.

“We should learn to own and take full advantage of, rather than deny, the fact we’re making amateur theatre”

We aren’t seeing complete originality, mess, stuff being thrown at the wall in a way we are totally at liberty to do in student theatre. Theatre here is, generally speaking, almost entirely risk-free. If things don’t work, careers aren’t tarnished and audiences are forgiving. So it’s a shame we aren’t trying to take every risk we can when it’s (amazingly) possible to do so. Our attempts to replicate professional productions are often fruitless because they’re being thrown together quickly and the impulse behind them feels a bit unhealthy – productions want to be good, rather than test the boundaries of the form. We should learn to own and take full advantage of, rather than deny, the fact we’re making amateur theatre.

We talk so often about re-evaluating productions through race and gender and, although critically important, age seems to slip through the net because it simply isn’t possible to interrogate in professional theatres. We rarely see actors aged 18-21 on professional stages because they’re in higher education. I wish we really looked at what it means to put young people on stage – it could be a chance for Cambridge theatre to redefine itself as something properly creative and daring.

“If we unlearn our attraction to creating ‘professional’ productions, maybe theatre in Cambridge could make a bit more of a splash”

There is, broadly speaking, a consensus on what good theatre looks like in this country. But, I think that’s a glass ceiling, and that we could do something which feels more pertinent and effective and potent, in part by not trying to do “good theatre”. I’d love to see a young people’s language which isn’t afraid to tear up the text and examine plays’ place in the culture. It could be massively rewarding to take real steps to understand drama’s place in the modern world. I understand that simply “tearing up the text” isn’t a new idea, and this is why the singular lens of age becomes so interesting and valuable. If we unlearn our attraction to creating “professional” productions, maybe theatre in Cambridge could make a bit more of a splash.

I’d like to see a theatre that properly acknowledges the fact we are young people both making and performing these shows. Theatre is about liveness. It disappears as it is created – let’s not try to make things to last; let’s make them to live.

To give an example: what’s a popular play? Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. What if it wasn’t played with an aged-up cast on a drawing-room set? What if a production focused on themes of ageing by producing the play with a young cast? In the same way we play with the gender and race of characters, what can we find when we play with age? I think young directors might make this interrogation aggressive. I think they might find a new physical language. I think they might refer to the idea of leaving school, of becoming adults. I think they might find the parents a bit hard to understand as characters, but that is a perspective that exists and should be presented.

“If dramatic immaturity is the outcome of this experimentation, then I’d let that flourish because it’s still emotionally and intellectually truthful”

Or, take Ivanov, written by Chekhov aged 27. I think it would be wonderful to, in our short turnarounds, to have somebody write a quick, scrappy adaptation (both freer and more dynamic) that filters it through a cast of young people, uses verbatim snatches of dialogue from college life, presented as if a group of young people have simply taken over the theatre space, with little need for set and costumes. While this might share aesthetic tendencies with something Ostermeier or Brook might have done, we aren’t using a regietheater (director’s theatre) aesthetic for the sake of being cool and edgy, but rather rejustifying it on our own terms, creating our own philosophy.

A key part of exploring what it means to put youth on stage is to not feel we can simply stage existing plays with young characters about young people’s issues. If we do this, the risk we run is exploring youth on somebody else’s terms. The entire project can be threatened if we try to imitate professional productions about youth because that inevitably invites unwanted discussion on its relationship with the original.

It is also worth asking what a youth-centred theatre practice means for criticism. We would simultaneously want to support the project and highlight its flaws. But that’s perhaps because criticism would be employed in a different capacity – not to tell you what is worth seeing, but to engage in the critical dialogues which endorse, support, and navigate the things we see on the Cambridge stage.

Of course, the ideal is to have new writing, but I think the rigour of looking at the canon and seeing how it relates to our bodies and our cultural references would give us a really strong foundation on which we can elevate productions of new writing beyond familiar realist structures. We just don’t know what a production directed by an 18-year-old with full creative control looks like. It’s easy to simply say: “bad”, but I’d hesitate before concluding that. It’s possible there are whole ways of thinking we dismiss because we aren’t sure. And if dramatic immaturity is the outcome of this experimentation, then I’d let that flourish because it’s still emotionally and intellectually truthful. The familiar reach for professionalism isn’t.