My role as a director was to choose an appropriate script to use, or base our performance on. The group debated many original scripts and themes for the play. These are displayed in the spider diagram below which was made very early on in the process.

 

 

From this diagram you can see that all of our ideas were based on current political/ethical issues. The first script i read was Roy Williams’ play Fallout, although, i did read many other scripts no other seemed as fitting and relevant as this one. However, the script itself did not seem enough, it did not bring as much emotion to a reader as we would have liked, as our aim was to create a hard hitting emotional piece which could really have the opportunity to highlight serious issues surrounding crime in the UK.

When reading around the subject of crime plays, looking into reviews and successful staging. This was to find out what style of staging really worked with such a hard hitting script. On doing this I found a blog on the effect of verbatim plays on an audience, how they have the possibility to involve the audience in a real life story and bring about social change.

‘We believe that theatre – where there is no screen between performer and audience, where we are not abstractions to each other but living, breathing beings – is the place to do this. We owe it to ourselves, to each other, and to our culture to make each other’s stories our own.’  (Gardner, 2010)

Although the play Fallout is based on real life events, the stabbing of Stephan Lawrence and Damilola Taylor, I felt that the play was missing an element of believability and relatability. The articles lead into discussions of interjecting verbatim through the script from the Stephan Lawrence transcripts. These were provided by Kelly Bramall (Dramaturge) who was able to go through the transcripts and decide which parts should interpose throughout the script.

The idea of adding verbatim into the script was that the audience were at one point faced with the comedy of the script, the jokes between the teenagers, but then struck by the seriousness of verbatim. We felt that the contrast between fiction and the real world would bring a greater effect on the audience, leaving them with a lasting impression of the play.

As we were creating a new script from Roy Williams’ play and verbatim, we decided that the script needed a new name.  Through research done surrounding knife crime we found out that 130,000 people were victims of knife crime in the UK last year alone, giving us the title of our play.

Works Cited:

Gardner, Lyn (2010) Verbatim Theatre: the people’s voice. Theatre Blog with Lyn Gardner, The Guardian