My publisher Nick Hern Books, have kindly given me permission to publish the Foreword to my new play volume, The Domino Effect and other plays for teenagers, as a blog post. In an eerie coincidence, this new volume of three large cast plays for inner city teenagers, is out today, Thursday 7 May, the date when Britain goes to the polls... I reflect on that towards the end of this Foreword.
What's more, there's a 20% discount on ordering the volume in the next week, details here.
Introduction
Fin Kennedy
I first experimented with
writing for an ensemble in my very first play for teenagers, East EndTales, a series of dramatic poems
about inner-city life, written for multiple voices and inspired by articles in
East London newspapers. At the time (2004) I was writer-on-attachment at Half
Moon Young People’s Theatre, developing my first professional play for young
audiences for a national tour. That play, Locked In, involved only three actors,
largely because they were all professionals who needed paying – and also
because the entire show had to fit into the back of a van. East End Tales, however, was the result of a
short residency in an East London school, into which Half Moon sent me as part
of my own professional development as I learned to write for their target age
group.
Writing a play for young people
themselves to perform, as opposed to professional actors performing for an
audience of young people, is a very different thing. For a start, in the
former, large casts are actively encouraged so that as many people as possible
can take part. This presents challenges as well as opportunities. Maintaining
coherent storylines and meaningful character arcs for ten, fifteen or even
twenty named roles is not always possible, especially when the overall running
time is unlikely to exceed forty-five minutes. Then there is the nature of
rehearsals stretching over weeks or even months, and the likelihood of cast
changes due to teenagers’ busy lives, clashes with other projects or just
general dropouts.
One technique I developed to
deal with these variables is a choral writing style, which uses nameless
narrators to introduce and guide the telling of the story. This can accommodate
anything from two to twenty narrators in the chorus. Often the language is in a
playful, lyrical style, which makes the lines easier to learn – the idea is
that everyone learns the lot, so that in the event of cast changes (or drying
on stage) others can cover the lines. This form also plays to one of teenagers’
great strengths – acknowledging the audience and telling them a story directly.
Young actors are naturally good at this, and audiences love its conspiratorial
nature. Other, named parts can and do emerge, but the chorus of narrators is
never far away.
The three plays contained in
this volume are therefore for large casts of young actors aged thirteen to
nineteen. Cast sizes can vary due to this ensemble style, but the minimum is
about eight (for The Domino Effect, though it can be
done with more), and the maximum about sixteen (for The Dream Collector). Fast is more fixed as it uses named characters throughout, and
tries to do justice to giving each of them a journey, but even so it can be
performed with either nine or twelve actors (depending on whether the four
older parts double or are separated out). Ensemble casting can also include
non-speaking parts, who can use physical theatre, dance and music to create
stylised representations of the world of the play. In this respect, the only
upper limit on cast size is the imagination of the company taking the play on.
Each script in this volume was
developed with a different group of diverse young people in inner London,
though the characters and stories are universal enough to suit most young
people’s groups. The specific circumstances of ethnicity, culture and geographical
location are less important than a strong ensemble ethos. A willingness to
experiment with a physical performance aesthetic will help significantly, as
will a commitment to working together to create the onstage magic necessary to
tell these stories in a way which will delight an audience, allow transitions
to unfold smoothly, and communicate each story’s emotional truth.
Each play was conceived under
different circumstances and it may help those of you hoping to stage them if I
tell you a little bit about how each of them came about.
The Dream Collector
The Dream Collector was the fifth play developed with my long-term collaborators,
Mulberry School for Girls in Shadwell, East London, with whom I have been
creating new plays for over ten years. (Our first four are also published by
Nick Hern Books in The Urban Girl’s Guide to Campingand other plays.) However, in
2012 we added a new twist. By this time our work had become known locally as a
pioneering partnership between a playwright and an inner-city state school. In
an effort to continually evolve the way we work together, and to share some of
the expertise we had built up, we decided to reach out to another local school
during the making of our next play, and see if it was possible to develop a new
play across two schools simultaneously. I approached local comprehensive, St
Paul’s Way Trust School in Bow, who were eager to be involved.
The practicalities of such an
arrangement at first appeared to be problematic. If I was the sole writer then
clearly I could only be in one school at a time. Yet running joint sessions, in
which one school’s students would travel after school to attend workshops at
their partner school, would soon become expensive and logistically difficult.
With sessions having to start some time after 3.30 p.m. in order to allow the
other school’s students to arrive, what would the students already on site do
in the meantime?
After some deliberation, our
solution was simple. As the one who was the most easily mobile, why didn’t I
travel between schools, taking the ideas for the play with me? In this way we
hit upon what turned out to be quite a neat model. After-school workshops were
held twice a week on different days, one in each school. I would develop ideas
with Mulberry in one session, then take them with me to St Paul’s Way,
presenting them to their students, developing them further, then taking the new
ideas back with me to Mulberry the following week. The whole thing became like
a long-distance version of the party game ‘Consequences’. It was fun – each
week the students were eager to see what new ideas the other school’s group had
added to their own. In this way, the two groups never actually met one another
until the readthrough of the first draft of the complete play.
All this had an impact on the
play’s form. The Dream Collector concerns
a Year-Eleven school group who go on a Media Studies trip to an isolated
country house which had belonged to a black-and-white movie pioneer, Charles
Somna. Upon arriving, they soon discover that Somna was responsible for much more
than the creation of mere movies – as the inventor of the Somnagraph he had
built the world’s first machine for screening your dreams. Once they step
through the movie screen and enter the Dreamworld, each of the young friends
meets their dream double, the sinister Neverborn…
The idea of having essentially
two casts within one play was deliberate. It was intended to allow two real
casts to rehearse their parts separately if necessary. While the Neverborn are
present during the journey to Charles Somna’s house, the Real-World cast are
not aware of them. Both casts could (in theory) rehearse their sections
separately and come together later in the process to put the final show
together. This could be useful in future iterations, if two groups within the
same school cannot rehearse together for timetabling reasons.
However, once the play was
written, it became clear that the logistics of joint rehearsals across two
schools would be insurmountable. Who would direct the show? If it was to be two
teachers, one in each school, how would creative responsibility be equitably
shared? Would rehearsals have to wait each day for half the cast to show up
from the other school? In which school would the set reside?
In the end, each school agreed
to stage their own separate production. At first this seemed to be a pity, but
the benefits soon became clear. Each school had co-commissioned the play via an
equal financial investment, and that investment suddenly reached twice as many
students. Eventually, each school’s students were able to visit one another’s
production and discuss the creative choices made with a deep knowledge of the
play. For some, this became a piece of coursework.
In terms of the education and
theatre sectors working together in future, this got me thinking. If two or
more schools co-commission a play from a writer, yet produce their own
versions, suddenly the project becomes a lot more affordable.
It multiplies its reach, and the
writer gets two (or more) productions all in one go. In this age of austerity,
this kind of innovative thinking could well come into its own. If any schools
reading this are interested in forming a consortium to work in this way to
commission new work (and not just from me!) then I would be happy to advise –
do get in touch.
Fast
Fast came out of a very
different process altogether. It was commissioned by a theatre company rather
than a school. Y Touring has for fifteen years been producing and touring plays
for young people about complex, science-based issues. Their unique ‘Theatre of
Debate’ format allows young audiences to be involved in the creation of new
plays right from the start, by inviting them, along with the playwrights who
will be creating the work, to workshop days in which scientific specialists
present different perspectives on the issue under discussion. I was invited to
attend the debate day surrounding diet, fast food and food security, which took
place as part of the development of Sarah Daniels’ 2014 play Hungry. My brief was to conceive an
accompanying play for an ensemble of young actors along similar themes.
Fast concerns Cara, a
sixteen-year-old student at a comprehensive in an unnamed small town, close to
some countryside. Cara is from a farming family, and we learn that one year
previously her father had committed suicide. When Cara’s school holds a
twenty-four-hour fast in aid of Oxfam, Cara decides she will not eat again
until Tesco and the other suppliers, whom she holds responsible for driving her
father to suicide, are held to account. The play touches on issues of diet,
commerce, class, industrial farming, the environment, grief, austerity and
friendship with (I hope) wit and a lightness of touch. In Fast, the ensemble are all named parts and as such have clear
identities and character arcs, each with their own distinct view of Cara’s
actions. This allows for considerable ownership of each character by each cast
member, and would lend the play to analysis and deconstruction, for example
hot-seating each character to learn more about their background and views. Fast was workshopped at Regent High
School in Camden before being performed by a young people’s summer school cast
in August 2014.
The Domino Effect
For The Domino Effect I returned once more to Mulberry
School for Girls. In 2014, Mulberry was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary
and was keen to take a new play to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Mulberry and
I had built our reputations at Edinburgh, taking a play every year for three
years between 2007 and 2009, with our third show, The Unravelling, scooping
the Scotsman’s prestigious Fringe
First Award. (All three of our Edinburgh plays, plus one other, are published
in The Urban Girl’s Guide to Camping and otherplays).
The Domino Effect was conceived in summer 2013, while on a short break in
France, during which I watched again one of my favourite films, Jean-Pierre
Jeunet’s Amélie. Hang on, I thought.
This is a Mulberry story. Set in the inner city, with a teenage girl at its
heart, Amélie is about a quiet
deep-thinker with a rich imagination, which starts to spill out into the real
world, until even she isn’t sure what is and isn’t real. I often met young
women like this in Mulberry, though I often met loud extroverts too, but this
seemed a good opportunity to develop a play looking at the interior worlds of
these more introverted students (who are also not always the easiest students
to engage in Drama). I started to wonder, what would an East London version of Amélie look like? As I knew Mulberry and
its students so well, the school agreed for me to lead on writing a first draft
then to workshop it with students afterwards.
Around the time I was sitting
down to write the first draft, I was having some work done on my house. One
morning, one of the builders came up to my study and handed me a set of dusty
Victorian dominoes he had found underneath our floorboards. Playwrights can be
superstitious about these sorts of signs arriving as some kind of heaven-sent
inspiration, and I am no exception. The metaphor seemed to be perfect –
dominoes, and the domino effect, as a cascading symbol of actions we set loose
into the world, knowingly or not, from apparently insignificant beginnings. All
the subsequent sessions at Mulberry confirmed that this idea captured the
students’ imaginations as much as it had captured mine. The resulting play
about ‘small actions, big effects, and mastering the law of unintended
consequences’ ended up securing us our first five-star Edinburgh review and a
clutch of enthusiastic reviews comparing the dense, poetic text to Dylan
Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.
The Domino Effect was the first time Mulberry’s Drama and Dance departments
had collaborated on a show, and the script was conceived with this in mind. It
is undoubtedly the most ambitious text I have ever written for a young people’s
group. The detail of the world it observes is not only about the audience
seeing things through Amina’s peculiarly observant eyes, it is about planting
small references which will become significant later, and about charting the
ripple of one’s actions in an area of high-density living. In performance it
requires crystal-clear diction, an ensemble that support each other
instinctively, and the sharpest of physical-theatre aesthetics to bring to life
the play’s multiple locations in the blink of an eye. Every narrative section
is intended to be physically animated onstage by the ensemble. The play will
not work if everything stops for the narrative to be merely recited.
I have described The Domino
Effect as a love letter to East
London, and indeed to the wonderful Mulberry School, where I have spent a
decade honing my craft. But I hope that the play will have a resonance far
beyond the specific British-Bangladeshi community that inspired it. Ultimately,
it is about showing young people that they have more power to change their own
destinies than they could ever realise, whoever they are and wherever they are
from. The play would suit mixed casts, though it also provides the opportunity
for teachers to offer leading roles to Asian or Muslim students, and I would
encourage them to do so.
Since writing these three plays
I’ve been appointed Artistic Director of touring theatre company Tamasha, a new
chapter for both me and the company. In the immediate future it means I’ll be
doing less writing of my own and more working with other writers to develop a
new generation of dramatists. But I carry the inclusive, community-focused
ethos which inspired these plays with me into my new role. Having an
infrastructure opens up some exciting possibilities – such as Schoolwrights,
Tamasha’s pioneering new playwrights-in-schools training scheme, the first of
its kind in the UK. If you are inspired by the plays in this volume I’d
encourage you to get in touch with us to see how we might be able to work with
your school, to support and develop the work your Drama department is doing. As
a national touring company, Tamasha has national reach, so it is not necessary
for your school to be in London or the south-east.
I could not finish an
introduction to a collection of plays for young people in 2015, with a looming
General Election, without some reference to the current Government’s attemptsto downgrade arts subjects, and especially Drama, in our nation’s schools over
the past five years. To be putting out a new volume of plays for schools at
such a time feels positively defiant.
It is.
As I hope the plays in this
volume show – and the many more by my colleagues still writing for young
people, not to mention the Drama teachers up and down the country heroically
defending their subject from a hostile Government – to teach Drama is to teach
life. It is to teach how to be human, how to have agency, how to be heard. How
to work through our differences, how to compromise, struggle, think and feel.
How to be an intelligent, successful and humane society.
I’ve written elsewhere that
teaching creativity in schools is like installing the software on which all the
other information will run. Disincentivising it within the curriculum makes no
sense. To teach Drama, creativity, the arts, is to teach how to think for
oneself, and ultimately therefore, how to become oneself. What lesson could be
more important than that?
I hope that this volume, in its
own small way, will help keep our subject alive in the place where its flame
can burn most brightly: in the next generation’s hearts and minds.
The Domino Effect and other plays for teenagers is published today by Nick Hern Books and can be ordered here.