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.
This sounds fantastic.
Comment by Henry — October 23, 2009 @ 3:34 pm |