Nick Ahad: Moment of madness means missing student drama festival – again

The crazy-haired physicist said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Well, I’ve only gone and fallen into the trap again this year of not putting the National Student Drama Festival at the very top of my list of priorities and my resulting disappointment is the same as ever.

When I became the Yorkshire Post arts correspondent seven years ago, I’d heard of the NSDF, but hadn’t really grasped what it was exactly.

Then came a crisis in 2008 when the Arts Council threatened to pull funding from the Scarborough-based annual event and I suddenly found myself writing about a festival at which Simon Russell Beale, Brian Blessed, Adrian Edmondson, Ben Elton, Stephen Fry, Meera Syal and Pete Postlethwaite all experienced the stage for the first time.

I went to the NSDF the following year to find out what all the fuss was about and spent a couple of days in Scarborough watching as thousands of students, and recent drama school graduates, took part in performances, discussions, workshops and all kind of activities related to the craft of the stage. It was exhilarating.

Last week as my diary started to clog up, with new shows opening in Hull, Bradford and Halifax, I found myself thinking that while a couple of days in Scarborough would be interesting and I’m sure that the readers of Culture would be pleased to see the coverage, I didn’t think I could spare the time. We asked drama school graduate Mez Galaria (page 5) to cover the event for us. After all, I thought, it’s only a “student” drama festival: would I be missing that much? And that was where old Albert would have raised a hairy eyebrow, called me insane and pointed out that I had repeated the same mistake I used to make before being fully introduced to the NSDF.

Earlier this week, as I returned from the launch of the Batman Live stage show in London – which I was covering instead of being in Scarborough – I found a review in a trade magazine of a performance at NSDF by students from Leeds University. The cast includes the rather brilliant Jimmy Walters (who appeared in a Harry Potter movie and was directed in a stage play by yours truly a couple of years ago). He’s a wonderful actor and I was so pleased to see the production he is in winning high praise.

It prompted me to dig out a review from 2009 when I wrote that I had seen at the festival what I considered to be the best piece of theatre I’d been to in a decade as a theatre critic.

It appears that there may, unsurprisingly, be drama of a similar standard in Scarborough yet again this year – and I realise that Einstein’s right I’ve been mad to miss it.