Satinder Kaur Chohan on the development of the multi-authored play

The Water When It Burns has been a wholly experimental venture, involving the five writers currently on attachment at Hampstead Theatre. In three one-day workshops, led by our Literary Manager Neil Grutchfield and Richard Twyman in a dramaturgical/facilitator role, we’ve organically developed a play from inception to a near final version.

In the first workshop, we brought in ideas and material inspired by the theme of ‘irreconcilable conflict’. Against the visual backdrop of a Scottish flag and Union Jack, Iraqi songs of unrequited love and Elvis Costello’s ‘Riot Act’ played out alongside quotes by Franz Fanon and Hegel and youtube footage of DV8’s physical theatre with mention of Stanley Kubrick, Shakespeare and Jhumpa Lahiri along the way. Animated table talk veered towards experiences of English/British identity and then, a focusing of themes (symbiotic conflict, duels, public apologies…), formed the basis of short dramatic pieces for the next workshop.

Those pieces included stories of rootless, rusting anchor children, a modern day Othello, UN diplomats and Wonder Woman. Breaking down the dramatic elements of each (event, location, time, central conflict, character types/actions/objectives, story beats…), common and interesting elements formed the outline for short collaborative scenes between paired off writers. These and further individual scenes in the workshop eventually led to the idea behind our group play – a plane crashing into the river of an English village idyll.

Post-workshop, we emailed around research and ideas looking into the size/type of plane, reasons why it crashed, how it crashed, the make-up of the village, identity of those on the plane and in the village – all of which we decided in a writers-only meeting.

We also decided on a structure of 10 scenes, with brief dramatic outlines. We used characters from our individual and collaborative pieces and added others to follow action from the crash and its ripple effect on characters and relationships within the village. After dividing up scenes and characters, a week of frenzied scene writing followed. Each writer collaborated with every other writer to write a scene as well as an individual scene. Our varied approaches included penning scenes together in person, writing an initial scene which was then emailed back and forth with additions and writing two different versions of a scene and piecing the best bits together – to create a first draft. Glaring plot and character inconsistencies would be ironed out during the rewriting period.

In the third workshop, Neil and Richard helped us to break down the dramatic elements of the first draft and offered dramaturgical advice. A subsequent weekend of rewrites followed. We now await further dramaturgical feedback in time for a final fourth workshop in early October. A final script is due a week later, before our director Chris White takes the play to performance.

Obviously, the idea of a ‘group’ play has been paramount during the process. By bringing 5 writers together of different personality types and backgrounds, a group dynamic will naturally emerge. Some writers may assert more control, compared to others more cautious in their approach, with varying shades in between. Thankfully, we’ve been mutually supportive of one another. It’s been fascinating getting to know the other writers better creatively – how they think, write, approach their work, what inspires and engages them. It’s also been essential to remain receptive to their ideas, making creative compromises to find common ground.

Yet in the first workshop, Neil also urged us to make virtue of our five contrasting perspectives – not to create a seamless play submerging our 5 voices or to create 5 separate plays within one. So we’ve tried not to allow individual voices to be subsumed, while trying to create enough of a cohesive and engaging narrative, within a very compressed time frame. Our actual time together has been limited, so we’ve had to find quick creative solutions, rather than ideally exploring or debating creative options at length. At times, it has felt as though writing as part of a weekly TV script-writing team for the theatre!

If The Water When It Burns is a play that rightly, will be rough round the edges and between the seams, all things considered, it’s been a brave effort – an experimental play of the collective imagination.

Where we are now

It’s been a good last two weeks as we’ve been seeing the projects that have been discussed excitedly in theoretical terms for a while now, start to take definite actual shape.

Our five attachment writers are continuing work on their collective play. The rather brilliant title has now been confirmed: The Water When It Burns. Since the initial draft, the writers have been working together further to revise and extend the story. It’s about making sure that each character feels fully fleshed out, that each story strand is given time and each point of view is represented; while keeping the essential structure intact, as the play moves towards its fairly devastating climax. We’ll be starting to think about casting at the end of this week. Many of the parts are playing dual characters so we’ll be looking for actors who can convincingly communicate different personalities using the most minimal of tools; and who can conjure the right energy and storytelling verve on what will essentially be a bare stage. In general we’ve been talking a lot recently about how the festival events are ways of seeing what can be conjured out of thin air – that is, how an audience can be drawn in to a performance that involves absolutely nothing apart from a spoken script – and the co-authored play seems a perfect example of this.

Nabokov, glowing from their recent success with 2^nd May 1997 at the Bush, have now confirmed with us the nature of the two pairings they are putting together for the festival: one a playwright working with a musician, and the other a playwright collaborating with one or several performance poets. So expect an unprecedented, multi-genre, miked-up extravaganza. More info on the individual artists involved to follow soon.

Our heat&light pairings are moving swiftly: we have now received the tantalising half-plays from Molly Davies and April De Angelis, and two of the young writers are each writing a continuation of one of these stories in their own way. The original workshopping session threw up ideas about fear of the future, the difficulty of being a young person in an uncertain world, and the temptation that arises sometimes just to cut and run. Molly and April have taken these themes and produced two fascinatingly open-ended mini-dramas about money, responsibility and – without giving too much away – individuals trying to take control of their own destinies. Once the young writers’ responses are written, each piece will be further discussed and refined with Molly and April, and we will end up with four daringly different pieces.

The Factory will this week be collecting final submissions of short pieces from the writers who have been involved in the workshop process. We will spend the week reading and assessing the scripts before selecting a final 10 for the festival performances. There are a number of things to bear in mind for this selection process, some of them unique to the “Factory way” – not only how well and how succinctly the pieces tell their story, but how malleable they are, how adaptable to different interpretations and radically different casting decisions. I sat in on a session recently and was struck by how different the characters appear when the genders are swapped over, or when the actors choose a different approach which utterly changes your sense of who has the power in the scene. A lot of work is done on the dynamics of the scene, often working quite counter-intuitively to produce a completely new impression of which character is really in control, which may confound expectations, even the writer’s. It was fascinating as well to watch two actors work with a supposed monologue, teasing out two different voices which after a couple of tries emerged perfectly clearly, one the attention-seeking aggressor and the other the quiet, slightly bullied, brooding fantasist. It makes you realise that there are certain secrets buried within a text, that it is always possible to get to with enough digging and with strong actorly instincts. Again it will be wonderful to see these instincts at work conjuring something from nothing in the festival performances.

And that’s all for now. Many more shapes to be thrown down in the week or two.

Corinne

One of our writers Nirjay Mahindru gives thoughts about being involved with the Factory project

The Factory’s 50/50 project with Hampstead Theatre

Some thoughts from a grumpy Writer.

When I heard of this project, my instinct was to carry on being grumpy and find reasons not to give it a go.  “Too busy” “Too tired” or “I’ll be damned if I miss any Arsenal games” are my usual excuses, but this time I thought I’d go along and at least see what it was all about.  On my way to Hampstead my mind thought positive thoughts, such as “These people will annoy me” “They will definitely irritate me” and when I heard they had a manifesto I was tempted to make a quick escape, with images of the 1970’s, placards, and a hell of a lot of shouting coming to the fore of my imagination.  Seen it all, done it all, can’t remember most of it.

At the introductory session, there was free wine, a sure fire hit with grumpies such as I, numerous actors mingled with a plethora of writers, all a bit unsure of what was in store for them.  We were told to gather in a circle and again, my mind started a grumpy wandering.  “If they think I’m going to hold hands and sing songs around the campfire….comrade…well, this lot has another thing coming!”  Thus armed with a rather cynical attitude I listened to what Artistic Directors Tim Evans, Alex Hassell and Associate Federay Holmes had to say about their company, and then we watched some sample pieces of work performed.  At the end of this introductory session they said something which made me pay attention, “We know our work is not for everyone, but we hope that some of you will come back next week and participate”.  Factory members were charming, OK, I’d at least give it a go, still unsure of the work or process, I had a slight concern of course, after all hard work never killed anyone, but why chance it? Life’s too short and I want to die peacefully, in my sleep, like my father, not screaming, terrified, like his passengers.

The challenge for the writer, the parameters as I understand them, is to write a piece, not more than 10 minutes long, with not more than 3 characters, with no stage directions, and with the understanding that the roles might be played by any Factory actor, of any age, sex, race etc.  Writers that are former professional actors, (like myself), may have an advantage in writing this way, as they should understand the processes actors go through in finding and creating characters.  What’s clear to me in the process that the Factory adopts, is that what they wish to avoid at all costs, is what I’d call “creative calcification”, where an actor’s journey is not unique to that time, but a mechanical set of behaviours based on the recent past’s template.

As a writer that doesn’t use too many stage directions anyway I started to have a ball. Suddenly, I was being creative again, challenging myself, stretching my own ideas, being a big kid again, playing, in the true sense of “play”, and at each stage of this creative journey, the Factory were encouraging co-conspirators.  I found the parameters a liberating experience, and each week the writers would be set a new challenge within those parameters.  Could we write something that didn’t involve humans?  Could we write something where two people are separated by a vast distance?  A new layer, a new challenge.  Cool!

At each session the writer is asked if they have brought in anything new, and how many actors will they need.  Actors are then randomly selected to work on the piece.  They sight read them, swapping roles.  Sometimes, the Factory will challenge the writer’s precious duologue by saying “Let’s see what it sounds like as a monologue instead” and an actor is thrown in the deep end and told to do it.  The Factory genuinely play with pieces, exploring just how far they can be pushed, and via that bravery of spirit, they encourage writers to push the envelope themselves.  For example, we’re currently exploring a piece written in a particularly aggressive street vernacular, that has an intrinsic idiom and rhythm to it.  Can such a piece be explored in new and creative ways?  I believe the answer is Yes, but would never have believed it prior to working with this exciting company.

The 50/50 project has been one of the best artistic/creative choices I’ve made in recent years, I’ve loved every minute of the process, the challenge, the freezing cold Michael Frayn room, and I find it ironical that by giving writers rather confining parameters, the Factory has opened up a whole new exciting creative world!

Countdown starts here

Hello all,

So here is the first of my diary updates on what we are doing in the build-up to Daring Pairings 3: our third dynamic and experimental festival of new writing. Certain elements of the various projects have been going for a while, but it’s around now that we’re starting to feel it’s all gathering apace. Very exciting!

I’ve been thinking for weeks of some sort of catchphrase to use to sum up what we’re doing. But it’s not easy at all. It’s new writing. It’s collaboration. It’s bringing different voices together. But more than that, it’s pairing different ways of working – different approaches to theatre – even different art forms entirely. The best way we can envisage it is as a takeover: for two weeks we open up the building to dozens of different voices, they collaborate with us to make new work that does its best to shake the foundations. It’ll be clamourous and spontaneous, it won’t always be smooth or polished, but it’ll certainly be new.

This week. The Factory have been holding weekly sessions with writers for a number of weeks now: allowing the writers the chance to see their words made flesh instantly, as draft short pieces are acted out by the Factory actors and all possible permutations and interpretations explored. Writers have now used what they have gained from the workshopping process to produce short pieces to submit for feedback from The Factory. One of the tests of the pieces will be whether they could potentially be performed by actors of any age, gender, ethnicity etc, while keeping the writer’s intentions intact. The first feedback get-together was on Tuesday and the second is this coming Monday- the word is that there have been some very productive discussions, and The Factory are enjoying getting stuck in to a dramaturgical process (with their own unique angle of course). The Factory describe the process on their own blog which is well worth checking out: http://thefactory.wetpaint.com/page/Feedback+Session+1+Sept+2009. We are now only a few weeks away from choosing the final pieces for performance.

The Heat & Light young writers have now been selected, the senior writers are on board (April De Angelis and Molly Davies), and the project kicks off in earnest tomorrow when the two playwrights lead a workshop with their young collaborators. They have the initial theme of “Before and After” and can run with this as much as they like when bouncing ideas around. April and Molly will then go away and write ten minutes of story – it could be an end needing a beginning, a beginning needing an end, or a middle needing either - which they’ll send us next week! Then it’s up to each of the young writers to decide how to complete one of the two stories.

Nabokov are busy getting people on board for two collaborative projects, pairing a playwright with an exciting artist in another discipline. This may be a poet, a comedian or a musician; it isn’t yet confirmed who the artists will be, but I’m looking forward to getting the news very soon.

The Multi-Authored Play is steaming ahead as the five writers have been meeting (under Hampstead’s benevolent watchful eye) for the past few weeks, and have now turned in the first draft of their collaborative play. It’s fascinating to track how the tone of the piece changes subtly as different writers take up the thread of the story; while the majority of the scenes are written by two writers jointly (Samantha and Kieran, Kieran and Satinder, Satinder and Joel, and so on) so that it still feels quite fluid rather than unbearably disjointed. The next steps will be to refine and polish the script, making sure there are no jarring inconsistencies while keeping discernible the five different voices …and to think about how to conjure a flaming plane wreck on a bare stage.

Anthony Clark our Artistic Director will be directing Noctropia, the new musical by Judy Upton and Oliver Searle, to be performed by the Musical Theatre students at Central School of Speech and Drama. Tony’s been filling us in on the plotline, involving a modern-day man who lives out his dreams of empowerment through a comic book world of his own creating – until his creations break through to the real world. It’s looking like it will be quite sharp and very funny – and utterly different from the work we normally do here, which I guess is the point. We are really happy to have the chance to get “them over the road” into the building, in contrast to our usual baffled watching through the windows as they light fires in their back yard and literally dance in the streets. Tony is meeting with the students early next month so it will fully get going then.

That’s where we are. Phew.

Oh and the actual countdown - it’s 68 days. Me I’m almost counting the hours.

Corinne