Writing Together 2003/4

Writing and performing

Writer: Kathleen McCreery
Schools: Hall Garth School, Middlesbrough; St Patrick’s School, Stockton
Coordinating Teachers: Valerie Metcalfe; Shirley Douglas

The aim of this residency was to involve two schools in a joint project with a playwright, focusing on writing for performance. It was to culminate in a staged event at which pupils from both schools would come together to share their work.

The chosen writer, Kathleen McCreery, was quick to point out that the time allocated – three half-day workshops in each school – could not possibly result in a full-scale, newly-scripted, rehearsed and staged drama! Kathleen’s personal working method is to concentrate in great depth on individual contributions and she was keen to restrict the scope of the final performance in order to do justice to the process of exploring the writing process as fully as possible with all the students taking part.

Plenty of e-mails flew back and forth between all those involved prior to the first workshops. (E-mail – and lots of it – remained the main form of communication throughout the project.) Being so experienced in this type of work, Kathleen was mindful of the things that can go wrong, including those seemingly trivial organisational details that can actually waste so much valuable time. A performance-based workshop typically requires a larger space than the classroom, and this needs to be ready on time – and uninterrupted.

Kathleen began her sessions with warm-up exercises, partly to loosen everyone up, partly to get them thinking about the physical nature of drama and to provide a reference for the students’ thinking about possible ideas for their writing.

Having essentially decided against the one-act, whole-group play, however short, Kathleen steered the students towards the idea of montage, a looser set of scenes with an overall theme. She explained how the various scenes might be different in length and have different settings, characters, times and styles. Each scene would stand on its own but together they would add up to more than the sum of their parts in exploring an issue or question of concern to the students. This was at the heart of Kathleen’s work: to help them understand that strong writing derives from a passion. She wanted them all to write about things which moved them, in anger, fear, pride, laughter, or in anything which engaged them in a powerful way. So, even though they would soon be working together in groups, all the students started by spending some time thinking individually about possible subjects.

Time was then spent discussing the nature of drama and the difference between writing for the stage and for other media. Kathleen also took the students through the essential aspects of a script. She was preparing them to marry their passionate thinking with some specific aspects of craft and notation that would eventually enable their ideas to be communicated onstage to an audience. Some of this of course focused on those aspects of drama where something is communicated by actions rather than words. The point about scripting, however, is that all these elements still need written instructions.

From St Patrick’s there were 28 students (a form group) and from Hall Garth 23 (not all of whom had worked together before). Kathleen writes: “The young people decided on the theme of conflicts in families and between friends... they gave examples: when their parents fight, when their dad shouts at them. They were surprisingly open... The theme chosen by St Pat’s was the importance of friendship and family and what happens when things go wrong. Bullying was also a strong contender. I suggested that these subjects could be combined, overlap and interweave, and the group was happy with that.

“Playwriting with children, particularly if you are expecting them to perform, is a more time-consuming, complicated and multi-faceted business than poetry or fiction. Their experience of drama is usually very limited, they don’t go to live theatre, they don’t read plays... they do watch TV and that is why their scripts sound and look like soaps; they have no other models.”

By attempting to address this in a way that could make a real difference, all within a very tight schedule, the way was paved for some anxiety. After the first two workshops, Kathleen was apprehensive about the quality of the work to be performed, simply because it needed so much more development. Almost miraculously, but of course as a result of a lot of work by all involved, the final workshops made huge leaps forward, and the performance itself (or ‘sharing’, as Kathleen preferred to call it) provided further significant strides, especially in the extraordinary confidence which the students mustered, knowing that this was ‘it’.

Kathleen’s comments on the final work speak of considerable achievement: “...there were a few scripts which showed real talent: interesting plots on relevant subjects, coherent narratives, realistic, occasionally sparky dialogue, well-observed characterisations, original dramatic treatments, an understanding of the use of stylisation. There were some splendid performances, too.

“It was also successful in that the young people were engaged from the outset, prepared to commit themselves, and displayed great maturity and responsibility at the final sharing. Their scripts dealt with emotionally complex situations and issues, and they did not shy away from the challenges. They believed me when I told them right from the beginning that they had both the right and the ability to voice their thoughts and feelings and tell their stories and that what they had to say was worth hearing, and that adults need to listen to children. From their responses in the discussion afterwards, it was clear that they had learned a lot, enjoyed the process and were aware that they had achieved something.”

This discussion took place (as did the performance) in front of a small additional audience comprising a number of teachers, governors and other visitors. The students’ comments on what they most enjoyed included “improvising, expressing yourself”, “sharing people’s problems”, “working together”, “meeting Kathleen”, “performing” and notably “getting rid of the rubbish you had at first and making it better”. This last comment was, for Kathleen, a great vindication of her insistence on redrafting – something to which the pupils had been initially resistant. There was, from the start, something slightly ‘combative’ about this residency, in spite of which – or maybe because of it – worked. As Kathleen writes: “It’s your job to shake things up.”