As the National Youth Theatre production prepares to open in The Abbey Theatre, Cassia Gaden Gilmartin speaks to writer Dylan Coburn Gray about the particular set of challenges faced by today’s teenagers.

Cast photo by Mark Stedman.

Ask Too Much Of Me opens in the national theatre soon. Written by Dylan Coburn Gray, directed by Veronica Coburn and featuring a cast of 16 young actors drawn from youth theatres across the country, it confronts the impact of the 2018 abortion referendum on a group of young people living on the margins of society.

Pausing to chat between long rehearsal sessions, Coburn Gray explains the story of the play: “They’re squatting in some unspecified location in the city centre, and it’s about their lives, and how their lives mirror the political change that’s going on, and how you can find the big political moments that no one person was responsible for in the tiny moments that they go through every day.”

The nature of the referendum, he says, lent itself easily to a play written for an ensemble cast. In one key scene within the play, a politically active character gives a speech listing those the young people are grateful to and those they’re not: “those figureheads who were tweeted about or briefly viral, the Simon Harrises, for finally deciding to get on board after 30 years of individuals dragging the issue into the public eye”. The referendum was won through small-scale battles fought by individuals, and the nature of a National Youth Theatre production – which aims to spotlight all of the young people involved, rather than focusing on a central character – highlights that reality.