Opinion with Monique Touko

A school trip to the theatre should feel fresh, dynamic and forward thinking. I want young people to come to theatres like Theatre Royal Stratford East – where we're staging Gone Too Far! – and feel like they too could be on that stage.

When I was growing up, my mum took me to see lots of productions at theatres like the Royal Court, particularly anything with Black actors or a new contemporary story. That was my lens. As a result, I saw a huge range of theatre, all of which has informed the work I make today. I hope educators in charge of the school curriculum are able to look beyond the obvious and consider what actually speaks to young people in today's society.

It's important that young people get to see, study and perform texts that reflect their lived experience, whether that's racially or in terms of class or location. You can make theatre relevant to young people by having language and dialogue that sits in their mouths easily. A lot of the time they're forced to study classical texts by playwrights like Shakespeare or Ibsen. This can be a barrier to theatre if your first experience of the form is in a language or style of speech that doesn't sit in your mouth or reflect where you're from.

When I first read Gone Too Far! it was so familiar to me: the conversations, exploration of colourism and the Black British experience more broadly. I thought, ‘I can access this’, which is exactly how a young person should feel in the theatre or when they're studying Drama at school. When a piece of theatre depicts a world that is familiar to young people, it's empowering, giving them confidence in their role as a storyteller and their place in the theatre.

Adding plays like Gone Too Far! to the curriculum is a start, but we need much more transformative change. It's about making sure that the curriculum is reflective of everybody. Young people are only going to be drawn into theatre when they feel that they're being authentically represented. From the Black British playlist, we'll be using to create the world and the South London-inspired set through to the characters our National Youth Theatre actors will step into, our goal is just that. If we don't make theatre relevant to young people, its whole future is at threat.

Monique Touko, director of the NYT REP Company's production of Gone Too Far!