THE ARTS: Young people are the consumers. They are the target market. Why are their lives so rarely shown on stage, asks Paul Mercier

The first time I did a playwrighting workshop for a youth theatre group, I made the mistake of teaching them what to do rather than enabling them to do it for themselves. I soon learnt that young people are well able to make it happen on their own terms and they prefer if you don't patronise them. You can throw them an idea, leave them to their own devices and they'll come back in an hour or two with something to perform for you. Usually, it's off the wall. But when they are true to their instincts and are full of confidence, they will give you pure drama.

In this context, I've watched young people produce characters and give performances that would not be surpassed by anyone. They have hit notes, dialogue sequences, plot lines and theatrical ideas that I, or any writer, could not better. They have done it with a sense of adventure, fun and ownership, equal to any other human endeavour. And, believe it or not, they can do it with discipline, application and co-operation.

But in the greater scheme of things, this is all just innocent improvised knockabout. Or is it? Who decides whether this is playwrighting or not? Whether the end product is or isn't a structured play? Whether the playmakers are qualified or not? I have been enthused, challenged and inspired by these youth drama experiences. I wouldn't be the only one, and I believe that theatre in this country owes it to the youth drama movement. Our culture is indebted to the sector and it is high time it gave it the recognition and support it deserves, for all our sakes.

Since the arrival of Youth Theatre and the establishment of the National Association of Youth Drama (NAYD), there has been a steady commissioning of writers to write plays for performance by its youth theatre members. It is as much out of a need to harness and give greater vent to the imaginative creative power of the sweatshop, as it is to address the dearth of plays generally for young people.

The most important feature of the commissioned work is that its voice is that of the young. We are seeing the world from their point of view, experiencing it through their consciousness.

The plays are saying that the condition of youth is as important as any other human condition. How a 15-year-old interprets the world is as valid and as stage-worthy as the interpretation of a 25-year-old or 50-year-old. A 15-year-old telling us how it is from her perspective is not an apprentice. She is not in an undergraduate showcase. It isn't a competition, nor is it a springboard to better things. It is what it is, a play, and she is who she is, a 15-year-old.

In fact it's insulting to the young performer that the adult world, which controls the means of production, considers its own naivety, misguided ways and immaturities to be more the stuff of real drama than those of a teenager.

When did we ever see a play performed by young people about young people and for young people on our national stage? Yet walk through our retail centres and our shopping malls. Read the catalogues. Look at TV for a change. Young people are the consumers, directly or by proxy. They are the target market. And it says something about our theatrical culture that they are not the target audience.

Young people's imaginations are being colonised by market forces that we have no control over. Their consciousness is in the grip of materialism. Their individuality is measured by the extent of their disposable income. They have spending power like never before. They are drinking like there's no tomorrow. They are sexually active, drug-orientated and more violent. For diversion, they go from multiplex to flat screen to PC to mobile. And when they're bored with that, they get on a plane and do it all again somewhere else. Their understanding of responsibility to themselves and others is being challenged to breaking point. There is greater passivity, insecurity and depression. And suicide is on the increase.

It's not that youth theatre is going to solve all this. It's not that plays about young people should be about all this. It's about recognising that youth theatre and the writing of plays for young people should be proportionate to what's happening in youth culture and the world they live in. Yet our official culture treats the whole experience as if it were a phase they're going through. They'll grow out of it. When they've finished learning how to shop, drink, have sex and kill themselves, they will become adults and enjoy the arts - where there happens to be little or no theatre about young people.

Senior writers will say that the experience is out of their range; they risk writing for young people for the sake of writing for young people, producing something worthy, issue-based and cliched. Emerging and established writers want to be taken seriously so they'll avoid the subject. Naturally, they want to play to full houses on the main stage. Playwrights in general want their work to be respected as "literary" and not "educational" or "community" or "amateur". They want exposure, not to be exposed.

They want to be served, not compromised. Young actors do not have the skills or expertise to rescue a character, a scene or the whole shebang itself should it all turn out to be a mess when transferred from page to stage. Or maybe it's just that it doesn't pay so well. End of story. But more to the point, why aren't young people writing their own plays? Maybe it's because nobody has said they can. Beginning of story.

Forget about theatre. Forget about the rules and write what you know, what you think, and, most importantly, what you like. Stop worrying about whether anyone else is going to like it. Everything else will fall in. And nobody's telling you what to do it or how to do it.

You're making it happen for yourself.

From foreword to PlayShare Volume 1 (€10), by five Irish playwrights: Leaving (Gerard Stembridge); Buzzin to Bits (Mark O'Rowe); Requiem for Lena (Veronica Coburn); Alien Nation (Max Hafler); and Folie Tha (Ciaran Gray). Devised by Irish youth theatres, it deals with themes of love and loss, racism, and friendship. www.youthdrama.ie