"Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without Chichester Festival Youth Theatre"

George, aged 13, a student at Bishop Luffa, will be playing one of the monkeys in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book this Christmas. The classic tale comes in a brand-new adaptation by Sonali Bhattacharyya from Saturday, December 16-Sunday, December 31 on the main-house stage.

“I started doing the theatre sessions when I was in year six, when I was ten or 11,” says George. “I mostly wanted to because I wanted to boost my confidence and I’d done a few school plays before. Personally for me it’s the way that I can really express myself, how I feel and how I react. If I’ve had a bit of a bad day, I can really switch up my personality. I just think I can feel things a lot more while I am acting. Sometimes I can make myself feel quite sad if I am doing a sad scene. The point is that you are really feeling it. I feel like I’m transforming into something else. Right now I am me but if I want to be something else then I can experiment with that and I can become something else. I felt really quite shy when I was younger and now because of this I definitely do feel a lot more confident.

“I did The Wind In The Willows last year. I was a ferret though actually I used to say to my friends that I was one of the bad guys! It was a real experience. While I was doing it, I was thinking a lot of my friends who were just hanging out and having fun over Christmas and I was thinking that that was what I wanted to do but the more we did it, the more we became a real family and I found that I really, really missed that family in January and that’s why I wanted to audition again for this one, just to be back with my other family once again this Christmas.”

The two productions – The Wind In The Willows last year and The Jungle Book this year – are obviously are very different: “We have got different directors for a start and I think with this one, (director) Matt (Hassall) has got quite a younger mindset than Dale (Rooks who directed last year) which makes a difference. He thinks more about the things that we think about as children and as teenagers though Dale is perhaps more experienced. But they’re both absolutely brilliant directors and really great to work with.

“I am a monkey in this show and in the first act the monkeys are seen as being people that you wouldn’t really want to be seen with. They’re annoying and vicious but as the play goes on you change how you see them and by the end I seem to be quite a nice guy. It’s just about the different ways that you see people. The monkeys just have a different concept of life. They have a different experience in growing up and I would say that they’re almost outcast because of the way they seem to be annoying but all the characters get to develop in the play. It is really interesting to do.”

The Jungle Book is being staged by Chichester Festival Youth Theatre until Sunday, December 31. The tale comes from Rudyard Kipling, adapted by Sonali Bhattacharyya with music by Ruth Chan.