Hayden Tonazzi is the CEO and artistic director of the Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP). Next month, they’re bringing their latest show, Saplings, to Theatre Royal in Hobart.

Saplings is drawn from workshops and interviews with people that have lived experience with youth detention in NSW. Why did ATYP choose to program this work?

We exist to platform young Australians whose voices don’t often get heard on a national stage, and that’s been true since Follow Me Home, a show we made years ago about youth homelessness. Saplings sits in that same tradition. It just feels like the right moment for this story. There’s been so much national conver­sation lately around the age of criminal culpability, the Raise the Age campaign, and the fact that First Nations young people are still so overrepresented in that system. We wanted to make a show that put real young voices at the centre of all that, and let audiences sit with the experience of these kids, not just the headlines about them.

It has been described as ‘hilarious and heartbreaking’. How do these two descriptors sit together in the show? What can the audience expect?

Honestly, that’s exactly what it felt like sitting in the room with these young people. We’d go into workshops expecting heavy conversations, and instead we’d meet some of the funniest, warmest kids you could imagine. A lot of them didn’t even seem to grasp how serious their situation was. They’d tell us these really hard stories from their lives, but always with this cheekiness and humour. That’s what got our play­wright Hannah Belanszky, and it’s what got all of us who went along to those sessions.

Hannah’s done something brilliant with that. The script is full of real, raw voic­es, and the humour is all theirs. Then the heartbreak creeps in as you watch that same youthful energy try to make its way through a system that just isn’t built to support them. We think audiences will laugh a lot, and then feel that laugh catch in their chest.

What changes when the show travels?

This is the biggest national tour we’ve ever taken on, and it speaks to some­thing we believe deeply: these stories matter to young people everywhere, not just in Sydney. Every stop brings its own version of the show. We’ve welcomed three new cast members for this leg of the tour, bringing fresh voices into a production that already means so much to us. The show itself is rebuilt for each space and our director and design team adapt the staging and blocking every time. Sometimes we only have a day to bump in, so the whole team, cast, stage managers, production crew, has to be nimble.

The show features a number of young actors, how does that differ from working with more seasoned actors?

We treat our young performers exactly the way we’d treat any professional ac­tor. That’s just our philosophy at ATYP. We’re here to give them a genuinely professional theatre experience and real development as artists, so we hold them to that same standard.

What we find with young actors though is they bring this fearlessness to the work. They throw themselves in com­pletely, and there’s a level of commit­ment that often produces something re­ally special. With a show like Saplings, that comes with extra responsibility too, because these performers are stepping into the stories of really vulnerable people, so we make sure they’re well supported the whole way through.