Advice for the Young at Heart (2013)

Advice for the Young at Heart

by

Roy Williams

Theatre Centre

2013

Advice for the Young at Heart explores issues around disenfranchised youths and their participation in riots and uprisings.

The action is set during the 2011 London riots but also makes reference to the 1958 Notting Hill riots. While youths are looting shops and battling with the police, 17 year old Candice is by a lock-up away from the main action waiting to lure a man to a beating arranged by her boyfriend Ryan. While she waits, she is visited by her dead grandfather Sam, dressed as his 18 year old self. In 1958, Sam faced his own moral dilemma: having been pressured into going out with his brother Kenny and violently assaulting Black men. After falling in love with a Black woman (Gloria, Candice’s grandma), he found the confidence to do the right thing and stand up to his brother. Now he is trying to help Candice do the right thing and stand up to Ryan.

Candice has a chance to learn from history but discovering Sam’s racist past has undermined her faith in adults, while the things she has done for Ryan have undermined her belief in herself. The dramatic crux of the play is whether she can change her ways like her grandad did before her. Bringing together past and present is a key aim of Black History Month and the simultaneous timeframes of Advice for the Young at Heart is similar to that of Winsome Pinnock’s The Wind of Change (1987), the first play discussed in these posts, which moves between 1986 and 1958.

The play was commissioned and produced by Theatre Centre, for their 60th birthday. The company make work specifically for young people and tour it directly to schools. You can watch the trailer and student response to the show in the video below.

About the writer

Roy Williams is an award winning playwright whose work addresses identity politics and issues of belonging. He was born in Fulham, grew up in Notting Hill and began his stage career as an actor, getting his first professional job at the Theatre Centre and then joining its Writers Workshop. He studied Playwriting at Rose Bruford College and the play he wrote for his degree, No Boy’s Cricket Club (1996) got him his first professional production. In 1997 he was the first writer to win the Alfred Fagon Award for Best Play for Starstruck. He has written over 30 plays exploring contemporary life from a Black British perspective and written a number of plays for, or about, young people including Baby Girl (2007) for NT Connections, an adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone (2014) and Fall Out (2003), a play about gang culture. More recently, with Clint Dyer, he has written a widely praised trilogy of plays, The Death of England, first created as microplays broadcast through the Guardian newspaper in 2014, then staged at the National Theatre in 2020 and revived in 2024 at Soho Place Theatre.

Watch: Roy Williams being interviewed about the play by high school students

Resources

Read: Clint Dyer and Roy Williams on The Death of England

Read: Roy Williams: ‘Why do I write?’

Discover more about Theatre Centre and their work