In the Summer of 2021, Down Stage Write began working in Whitleigh’s Sir John Hunt community sports college as part of With Flying Colours, a brand-new playmaking and performance programme for children and young people in Plymouth.
(With our support, students created story lines for their characters including storyboards of scenes)
After preliminary meetings with the With Flying Colours team and then members of the Senior Leadership Team at Sir John Hunt, we outlined two objectives for the first phase of the project:
1) To Co-create an audio play with a group of young people
2) To teach a group of young people the basics of writing a play
What that meant is that in each session, we had to both introduce a new element of playwriting theory, and then invite the young people to use it to generate content, whether that be asking them to invent characters, or to come up with plot points, including proposed inciting incidents or obstacles for the characters they had generated. Our 6-week plan looked like this:
(We also explored writing dialogue for characters with lots of lines from the students ending up in the final play)
Week 1) Idea generation
Week 2) Character
Week 3) Scenes + formatting
Week 4) Workshopping a script (Guest Actors)
Week 5) Redrafting
Week 6) Performance of a script (Guest Actors)
In essence, we compressed a professional play-writing process in to a 6-week window, from Idea to page to stage. We were joined by guest professional actors in week 4 to workshop the script and read the young people’s ideas out loud, and then again in week 6 for a reading of the final draft that was set to be recorded. A special mention also to DSW associate Playwright Mich Sanderson who joined us to co-lead our session on character.
As well as walking the young people through the fundamental building blocks of a play, we tried to embed other key lessons in to the process. Namely that a first draft is never a final draft and that hearing and seeing your work is the best way to learn about its strengths and flaws.
(SPOILER: The moment in the audio play where Tim pursues a mysterious stranger to the caravan park. When tying all of their ideas together, some of the material made it directly in to the final script, whereas some was adapted and changed based on feedback from the young people and our own process as playwrights in the room)
It is important to say, that with this being a pilot project for us, the learning was not one-way. We were constantly learning from the young people too. It was fascinating to get insights in to what stories they are consuming outside of school (with youtube and twitch proving particularly popular – Specifically ‘Dream SMP’), and how that informed the shape of the stories they wanted to tell. When it came to feedback, nothing was sacred, and on multiple occasions the young people were given a platform to note and ask questions of the script –sometimes brutal but always fair.
Our hope is that as the project progresses, Down Stage Write’s influence on the shape of the plays being produced will naturally lessen as the young people get a better sense of the tools and techniques they are learning about.
We can’t wait to share the play with you!
Jon and Sam