Tom Briggs – No Added Sugar

Endings

Tom Briggs / June 2, 2014June 2, 2014 / performance, Reflection

The above still is taken from about halfway through Three Words it is an ending but it is not the end. I can’t help but feel that this is where we are, showing an arbitrary ‘The end’ sign with every intention of carrying on and taking Three Words out beyond Lincoln. There is a lot of work between now and then to make the show lean enough to be profitable in today’s market but I have no doubt that the company will adapt as it has done until now.

The show started as an idea, the perfect final degree show and the phrase ‘A love letter to Lincoln’ was used frequently, it was to be a play about a place that we knew intimately and of our three years here, based partially on the model of shows like Still House’s Ours Was the Fen Country. Still House’s show is about the way people in the fens live, it is verbatim mixed with physical theatre and it attempted to transplant its audience to a place the majority of us had never seen. Dan Canham, the director, afterwards spoke about the difficulties of touring theatre with such strong affinities to a small community and the limited audiences they have come across (Canham, 2014).

We decided to be more ambitious and with much prodding from outside and in we left the idea of Lincoln behind and the show became less a tribute and more of a re-evaluation of love. Different people, performances and perspectives have shaped Three Words into what it has become. There are many other influences that are well documented but Still House was the first company to really make us re-evaluate exactly what we wanted the show to be and there have been many new developments ad cahnges in direction since, in short our greatest assets have been flexibility and ambition.

As for what happens next we will continue to take influence from other companies in how they operate on and off the stage. We will look to our current friends and support in Lincoln and also to other new and emerging companies and the models they are using to survive and gain notoriety for their work. Having spoken to companies like Unexpected Places, Karkinos Theatre and The Flanagan Collective we are beginning to understand the challenges and the opportunities facing No Added Sugar. So while this is the end of this blog, I’m very happy to say there’s still a long time until the curtain falls on us and Three Words.

Works Cited

Canham, D. (2014) Ours Was the Fen Country. [post-show discussion] Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, 5 February.

Between Setting and Action

Tom Briggs / June 1, 2014June 2, 2014 / Development, Writing

Image from Mark Ravenhill's 'Product' available at http://www.thestage.co.uk/news/2013/08/mark-ravenhill-arts-sector-needs-a-plan-b/ — Image from Mark Ravenhill’s ‘Product’ available at http://www.thestage.co.uk/news/2013/08/mark-ravenhill-arts-sector-needs-a-plan-b/

I have always loved the work of Mark Ravenhill, his plays create unique worlds and impossible situations that somehow have more to say about the way we live than simple mimetic drama. His play Product (2005) is a good example, it would seem to be a very clever and thoroughly human story of love, loss and ultimately extremism and revenge. Ravenhill chooses to tell this story to his audience as though it is a pitch to a movie studio, the inherent contradiction between the pure monetarism of the pitch format and the extremely sad story adds a comparison to the drama and asks the audience, perhaps for the first time, whether the religious extremism of the protagonist is in fact a direct reaction to the to the equally extreme capitalism of western society. It is able to at once be deeply human and extremely political.

This might seem like very strange example and certainly there is world of difference between Ravenhill’s play and Three Words. But Product is my favourite example of a technique in writing that I have used frequently when creating Three Words in order to create a dialogue between different elements of each scene. This is what David Edgar has called action and setting in is excellent book How Plays work, the action is the main narrative of the scene and the setting is all the surroundings, the location, company or situation (Edgar, 2009). In Product the setting is the movie pitch and the action is the story of love, tragedy and revenge.

The contrast between the two can be very fruitful to create drama and to build in new layers of subtext. Some scenes will obviously match setting and action together, the scene in Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking in which the character Mark is briefly re-united with his flatmates happens, as you would expect, in their flat. In the same play however, when Lulu finds out that that Robbie has given away all the ecstasy she was tasked with selling, she rages at him and eventually assaults him the whole scene is made all the more absurd by their being in a hospital waiting room.

I have attempted in several scenes to play with a contradiction in setting and action, in one scene (picture above) we plan a wedding for two audience members but we do it as if it were a a bank heist, complete with codenames, specialists, and even floor plan of the venue. Here the action of planning the wedding in contrast with the setting of heist planning served firstly to enforce the absurdity of the whole situation. It also reflected exactly how some people felt about weddings that the planning very quickly gets out of their hands and they are forced to please everyone other than themselves, represented here by the extremely pushy cast of calligraphy, catering and fashion specialists and the wedding obsessed psycho.

Here the style of writing is commenting on the content just as it does in Ravenhill’s Product, scenes are structured differently because they represent different things, so that scenes about the chaos and confusion of early relationships are contrasted with the scenes that are told from an older perspective and are about how couples grow together and build their own joint story. Each scene is structured to reflect the stage of the relationship it is to create a dialogue between setting and action, Ravenhill used this technique to draw parallels and ask the audience question. We use the same technique to summon sensations from the audience’s memories and imagination and bring them into the stores we created.

Works Cited

Edgar, D. (2009) How Plays Work. London: How Plays Work.

Ravenhill, M (2008) Plays: 2. London: Methuen Drama.

Verbatim and the Morality of Using the Words of Others

Tom Briggs / May 7, 2014June 2, 2014 / Reflection, Verbatim and Interviews

Verbatim theatre along with documentary theatre has become increasingly popular over the last twenty years. The central concept of verbatim is that you put the real words of real people on stage as near as possible to how they were spoken. Some of the first works of verbatim theatre to gain notoriety include Richard Norton-Taylor’s The Colour of Justice which used the court records to recreate key moments in the Stephen Lawrence murder trial. The Colour of Justice has since become very influential and many agree played some part in the inquiry and the Macpherson report that followed. The playwright Robin Soans has said that a certain amount of expectations have built up around Verbatim theatre and that an audience “will expect the play to be political” (Soans in Hammond and Stewart, 2010, 19) in the last few years however many have challenged this preconception and shown that verbatim can be more about the people than the politics.

Alecky Blythe wrote The Girlfriend Experience about the way prostitution works in modern Britain and while it was partly political it was made far more remarkable by the people and their real lives being displayed as they never have been before. Her next play was to eradicate politics almost completely London Road was about a community recovering from finding a murderer in their midst. Breaking the mould once more London Road is the first verbatim musical and this seems to indicate that Verbatim has lost it’s sacred status and that it is open more to poetic licence and experimentation.

In the above clip a range of verbatim writers talk about the balance to be struck between representing the interviewee and creating good theatre. Alecky Blythe expresses how she finds herself taking bigger leaps in poetic licence as her career has gone on. London Road as a play is the closest to Three Words of any verbatim play I’ve read because it concerns itself only with the people, what they do, and how they feel. It is verbatim used to bring new voices and perspectives into the theatre, it puts the humanity of its characters on display to the audience.

This too is what we wanted, people will always be at the centre of Three Words and we needed to inject a healthy dose of reality to ensure we were not making exactly the kind romance that Hollywood seems to incapable of escaping. That was when we made our decision to find as many interviewees and use their stories as the backbone of the show. We use verbatim in several places, much of it recorded, here is one piece that made it without any editing into the show.

In other places we have had to do as Alecky Blythe has done and edit, merge or downright invent stories for the purposes of making the show easy to follow. ‘The 2p Train’ was a based on a story from within the company and one from outside, we spoke to the outside party and presented them with our script for their confirmation. This type of merging is mentioned in the above video by the director Nadia Fall and it is commonly used in order to simplify the amount of characters the audience has to follow. As we only really had two characters throughout the show a lot of merging took place but always with the express consent of those we spoke to.

The clip above shows that Verbatim has lost some of the puritanical attention to detail that companies like Blythe’s Recorded Delivery developed in favour of something a little more theatrical. It has past the point of being simply political in the way that it was for writers like David Hare and Robin Soans. Verbatim is developing into more than a set of rules into another tool for storytellers to use. It brings people into the theatre that would never normally cross the threshold let alone step on stage and celebrates their stories. Verbatim is really the only way to truly represent people and that’s what Three Words is all about.

Works Cited

Blythe, A (2011) London Road. London: Nick Hern Books.

Blythe, A (2008) The Girlfriend Experience. London: Nick Hern Books.

Hammond, W & Steward, D. (eds.) (2010) Verbatim Verbatim. London: Oberon Books.

National Theatre (2014) The ethics of verbatim theatre. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39JSv-n W5U [accessed 4 May 2014].

Norten-Taylor, R. (1999) The Colour of Justice. London: Oberon Books.

Sir Toby’s Party, a Touring Company’s Nightmare

Tom Briggs / April 15, 2014June 2, 2014 / Development, Initial Ideas, performance

There is often a scene in Shakespeare, a crowd scene, a feast or a ball that that can be beautifully realised with the budget of National Theatre but for small scale touring companies these scenes can be nightmares, how is it possible for a touring company with a small cast to create Shakespeare’s great crowd scenes.

Act 2 Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is one such headache, a party that must get suitably out of hand in order to justify Malvolio’s statement that Sir Toby and Sir Andrew “Make a alehouse of my lady’s house” (Twelfth Night, II.iii.88-9). There are two obvious solutions the first is simply to make Malvolio seem even more unreasonable by having him interrupt a particularly sedate party.

Filter Theatre found another far more interesting way however, with just a small cast they looked beyond the proscenium arch for their party. The scene starts slowly with much shushing and tip toeing and very quickly gets out of hand as games begin on stage, the audience members hurling fuzzy balls at the cast and later at each other, pizza brought into the stalls and distributed, tequila slammers are given out on stage. The audience are not just watching the party, they are as Michael Billington observed “participants in feast of misrule” (Billington, 2008).

Above is a picture of some of their party preparations for each show, tequila and shot belt included.

All of this brings the audience into the chaos so that when Malvolio does eventually interrupt it is particularly unwelcome and fosters antipathy in the audience and characters alike. So that when the wayward knights do get their revenge on Malvolio, a hilarious but disturbing twist on the yellow stockings, the audience need not feel any sympathy for him.

Filter realised that the audience need not be passive in theatre and used them to give the show life. There is of course a long history of audience participation in performance but here it was used to give an old over-performed text some life. In a way we found ourselves in a similar position love as a concept is the oldest story, it comes with all sorts of clichés attached and it occurred to us that the audience was a resource for keeping the work new and unpredictable just as it has been for so many others. One scene around the subject of marriage planning was getting nowhere until we stopped acting all the parts and turned it over onto some guinea pigs.

The other lesson from the chaos of Filter theatre was that the theatre can make the audience live something rather than just watch it. Theatre can evoke sensations; it can make a scene look how it feels for the characters. This is a principle we have applied with our scene about keeping secrets in relationships. We could have written a naturalistic dialogue of a wife finding out about her husband’s affair, a scene that would have a fairly slow start a climax and some kind of resolution. This felt like a betrayal of the kind of work we wanted to do, to create something that vibrant and new, we instead focused simply on the climax so that’s we started with lots of revelations being spouted as quickly as we could building to a cacophony of voices all competing with each other to confess and with each lie a physical action, the girl who loves musicals way too much dances a tango from Rent, while they are scattered with rubbish by messy people and the make-up addict liberally applies lipstick to our stage manager. The stage picture is as chaotic and manic as the ensuing argument might feel in real life

These two lessons from Filter have helped us a little to navigate our way through what could easily been dull, clichéd scenes. Giving us the tools to make theatre we hope will be a celebration of the human obsession with romance and not merely another replica of stories that have been told for thousands of years.

Works Cited
Billington, M. (2008) Twelfth Night Review. [online] London: Guardian. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/sep/03/theatre1 [Accessed 11 April 2014].
Shakespeare, W. (2010) Twelfth Night. London: Macmillan.
FilterTheatre (2013) First Day Rehearsing. [twitter] 27 August. Available from https://twitter.com/filtertheatre/status/372366949054828545/photo/1 [Accessed 14 April 2014]

Engineering Spontaneity for Storytellers

Tom Briggs / April 8, 2014June 2, 2014 / Development

Recently, March 22^nd to be precise, Forced Entertainment live streamed their performance of And on the Thousandth Night… from Lisbon, I watched enthralled as these great theatre makers made stuff up, on the spot, for six hours. The basic premise of the show, which has now been performed for over fourteen years, is that a performer tells stories into a microphone until another performer interrupts them with a story of their own. The result is a great mass of individual narratives very few of which ever receive their ending, some last for minutes and others just a few seconds. Often they are interconnecting so that rather than being hundreds of completely isolated narratives each one is related so that each new story is a direct result of what has come before.

In the above clip the final story about the restaurant in the desert acts as the punch line to Tim Etchell’s slightly earlier story about the man searching for water. This is theatre that is not afraid to reveal its influences or its craft. None of these performers know what the next five minutes will hold and that means when something works, as it does at the end of this clip, the effect is all the more wonderful. The Audience is expecting chaos and is given something else entirely.

For me it asked a lot of questions about how we structure our own show, how we create narrative and create excitement out of spontaneity. For me the greatest benefit of a devising process is that so much can go wrong, but occasionally something goes wrong in a wonderful way. I have attempted in some ways to facilitate this in the way I structure rehearsal. Often there is very little set direction for a rehearsal, I will go in with an intentionally vague idea of what we want to achieve.

Yesterday the task set out on our rehearsal schedule was simply to ‘create a new sequence on the theme of weddings and commitment’. What followed was four hours of, occasionally heated, discussion and workshop until finally we had settled on a concept we liked and some ideas on what would actually happen. The direction that we eventually took was more or less a complete surprise to everyone and I’m very glad to say much more interesting than anything I had considered leading up to the rehearsal. Some much loved ideas, including and long reference to The Wizard of Oz, fell to the wayside as we found other sources that served the new scene better.

I have found that most of the time a lack of structure gives better results this, is of course, a credit to everyone in the company who are not content with just performing but are working closely to create theatre that represents us. We achieve much better results by pooling our talents than by adhering to a script written before rehearsal.

One small example is the image below. In this rehearsal we were meant to be working a scene about break ups in preparing the space we accidentally made this and our Jozey captured this image which has become our central marketing image.

The real genius of And on Thousandth Night… is that it encapsulates the chaotic process which has made their work so successful and literally puts it on the stage for the audience to enjoy. We are attempting to capture that same chaotic force to make our theatre exciting, enjoyable and unpredictable.

Works Cited

Forced Entertainment (2010) And on the Thousandth Night. [online video] Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wCbCpODReU [Accessed 6 April].