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| The empty set waits for actors and words |
Non writers are always interested in the process of writing; 'where do you get your ideas from?' is the commonest question asked at book signings and author events. Team writing however elicits curiosity from writers and non-writers alike. Whatever odd and varied perceptions people hold about the nature of writing, nearly all believe it to be a solitary, even lonely process. The following piece was written to answer the many questions I received after heading up a team of writers who produced a script for our local theatre group. The production was a sell-out success.
Sharing a pencil?
How do
you condense 750 years of history into a two hour play? How do you make it
entertaining and celebratory while not forgetting the hardships and tragedies
of many of those years? How can you give a sense of the broad sweep of history,
while making characters and incidents particular to the place? Above all, how
do you target an enthusiastic but conservative local audience without being
patronising or over intellectual?
These
were some of the questions we asked ourselves as we went through the
team-writing process.
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| "It'll be the death of Wigton, you mark my words" |
The Throstle's Nest was performed by Wigton
Theatre Club at The John Peel Theatre in Wigton on the 7th, 8th and 9th of June
this year. I am still surprised and humbled that between us we managed to
produce a play which packed the small theatre three nights in a row, and
received nothing but positive comments and thunderous applause from the
audience.
Normally
the writing process starts with a little inspiration, then generally speaking,
we write what we want to write- and go where our passions and interests take us
often following where our characters lead us. Despite the need to revise and
re-write it seems to be a relatively free and unconstrained process. Often we
are then left with a play which has fulfilled our ambitions and satisfied the
brief that we set out for ourselves but we have to find actors to act and an
audience to watch it. This is often dispiriting.
This was
different. This was the other way round- Although we didn't realise it at the
outset, we were writing an exactly targeted piece within tight parameters; Our writer's
journey was learning and defining those parameters and targets. I now believe
that the success of the Throstle's Nest
was mainly due to tightly targeted writing, writing which told a coherent story
despite a cast who in some cases were totally inexperienced.
Liz
Bell, Martin Chambers, Connie Jensen, Heather Larkin-Jones, Julia Newsome and
Rick Thomas- all members of North Cumbria Scriptwriters- met initially for some
brainstorming sessions to consider the overall form of the play. After our
first session, we went away to research the history. The amount of detail
available in books and online for the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries was as
expected, overwhelming; while the information about ordinary folks' doings from the
early years was scant.
Achieving
a balance between national and local history as well as between early and later
years was an additional challenge. We also had to include the current concerns
of the townsfolk, and link them to those of its past.
We
decided on an episodic structure: a series of cameos or sketches set in or
around the market place, each illustrating a particular period and the external
events which would have impinged on Wigton people. An early decision was to
have the same characters in every era, expressing similar views, and
illustrating recurring themes.
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| "No men, no beasts, no children, no food ... no hope" |
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The
early stages were both fun and crucial. As well as the problems and pleasures
of working with each other, we worked with the actors and director from the
outset. When I sent a few early draft scenes to the director, his comments
meant that some of our characters had a quick sex change. As with most amateur
theatre groups, Wigton's had more female than male members! This suited those early
turbulent years on the border- years of warfare between Scots and English when
most men were away fighting or dead, and it was left to the women to keep the
community going. Meeting with the players also meant that both sides were
reassured- they knew they weren't going to get an unworkable script and we were
reassured that our ideas would come over when the actors read them and started
to bring the words to life.
As well
as characters, we wanted themes to run through the play; the major one of these
being that change is a constant in our lives, and that it always causes stress,
but is eventually assimilated. The way we incorporate new things into our life
gives our society a sort of dynamic continuity.
We
clearly needed some sort of narration between scenes to help the audience
orientate themselves in time. We worked our way through comic monks, and
members of the cast carrying billboards across the stage, to characters
traditional to Wigton- the Lamp and the Pump. These evolved into a pair of old
gossips, who would be on stage all the time, commenting as well as narrating.
As is often the case with any project we ended up with the simplest possible
solution: a rhyming couplet at the start of each section, ending in the year.
Of
course, discussion, argument and brainstorming are enjoyable and creative, but
then words have to be hammered out and midnight oil has to be burnt in lonely
garrets. Meetings were to decide general
structure and trends, and to allocate writers to scenes and sections. Emails flew
back and forth and each time we met, we would read scenes, comment and
criticise, then go away to write individually again.
Accommodations
had to be made and, as with all writing, some favourite bits had to go. The
main difference is that in this case someone else told you that such and such a
line, scene or precious idea didn't work- and sometimes that was hard. Interestingly,
we often ended up writing additions and amendments to each other's scenes, and
looking back now, I sometimes find it hard to put a finger on who wrote what.
Individual contributions
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| "Six acres for a l'all railway!" |
Martin is a prolific and witty writer
and after our initial discussions went away and produced several scenes from
the 18th and 19th centuries, about the impact of new communications- roads and
railways- on a conservative community. This is where our main character- Seth,
emerged. In Martin's mind, and then for the rest of us, Seth became the
character who represented Wigton- a bit grumpy, and very resistant to change,
but good hearted. Seth grumbles a lot, but then gets on with his life,
eventually accepting change and incorporating it into the fabric of his life.
This character helped the rest of us build our own stories. I wanted Seth's
stoicism to be reflected in other equally representative characters; and so the
three market women were born. In the early scenes these characters were
archetypes. Their roles in different situations and times added to our
understanding of them so that they became real people for the actors and I hope
for the audience.
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| "It's been in our family for hundreds of years" |
Not all
of us managed to get to every meeting, and so we all made different
contributions. Heather could only
manage a few early general meetings but felt that we should have a Romeo and
Juliet theme- a pair of lovers who were thwarted by circumstances and families,
and who only finally came together in the 21st century. During our discussions
it emerged that they would need a
symbol- a ring or piece of jewellery to pledge their love and hand on down
through the generations. I believe this was one of Rick's ideas, and it proved
to be an important and unifying theme in what would have been a disjointed
story otherwise. In folk stories and traditional song the lover always gives
his lass a token to remember him by when he goes off to the wars. Our token is
a heavy silver brooch, the design loosely based on the penannular (broken
circle) Viking brooches found in the Penrith Hoard, but with the addition of a
stylised thrush and her eggs to symbolise Wigton.
Julia was to be absent for large
chunks of time, so took a discrete chapter of Wigton's history- the Civil War,
and wrote our second young lovers' episode. With a Puritan girl from Wigton
(which was known as "a nest of Roundheads") falling in love with a
wounded Cavalier officer, Julia created our most touching love story.
Liz and Martin visited an old folk's
care home in Wigton and basing their characters on some of the people they met,
evolved a story of a wartime love affair between a local lad, and the teacher
who came with the huge number of evacuees who landed in Wigton in 1939. This
could have developed into a full length play in itself, as the characters were
more developed than in shorter and earlier sequences. Because the material was
more familiar and close to us in time, we knew this would capture the audience's imagination. Liz worked
particularly hard on these scenes, working closely with Martin whose character
Seth was central to them. Gradually though, other characters emerged- Jeannie's
brother John, seen as a young lad and as an older, saddened and wounded war
veteran, grown up evacuee Michael and his feisty but bitter wife, John's
unknown daughter.
I began
to see it as my job to balance the alluring and often funny scenes of the
second half, with some drama and comedy in the early part of the play, periods
which were least familiar to the audience, and about which very little was
written. This was in addition to my primary role, which was to liaise with the
players, drive the project along and coordinate the scenes into one script with
consistent formatting throughout to make it readable.
In the
early stages, Rick mainly kept us on
course and added ideas such as the brooch theme We had some heated discussions,
for example about whether to run the whole play in strict chronological order
or to get dramatic and comic effects through playing with time and having
anachronistic elements. In this as in other areas, Rick's clear sighted and
incisive judgements kept some of our more fanciful ideas in check. As with the
linking/narration we fixed on the simplest structure in the interest of helping
the audience stay with us over our 750 year trip, and then Rick was able to
write parts of the early scenes and our two last ones.
Previously
he had written some dialogue for the two old gossips, Lu and Flu (short for
Lumen and Flumen- Light and water- from the lamp and pump) and we regretfully
abandoned these as they were very funny. Fortunately some of their dialogue was
recycled to other characters.
I had thought
the job would be done when we handed the script over, and beyond attending the
odd rehearsal out of interest that might well have been it. But, having
mustered the writers (the whole thing was my idea) and coordinated what turned
out to be a lot of effort and hard work, I could not abandon script and players
when it looked as if it would be impossible to cast all the parts, despite the
fact that the core players of the club loved it. A change of date meant that
people who would not have been able to act in it could be involved, but the
director would need to be away for that last week. I offered to oversee
rehearsals during that last week and that was it- I was then involved to the
hilt and spent time and energy trying to recruit actors and source props,
making the throstle brooch and even painting scenery, and, as I was at every
rehearsal, being consulted by actors about what we meant or could we change
this or that wording. Other writers attended rehearsals from time to time- especially Liz, but
Rick's visit, along with Liz's, the week before the dress rehearsal was crucial: he identified a
real dramatic weakness in two scenes in the World War Two sequence. Like it or
not- they had to be beefed up. Although this caused me huge distress and worry-
I felt it was a terrible imposition on the actors concerned to change and
add lines at this stage, I acknowledged the weakness of the scenes, as did Liz
who had written them after discussion with Martin.
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| "Life was hard after you'd gone- no lads left to work the land" |
There
was no time to be lost, so we short-circuited our usual methods: Liz and I met
the next morning, and sat with our computers side by side. It was almost as if
we were sharing a pencil. We hammered out some changes and added a small amount
of extra dialogue, acting the scenes out as we went. Then the same evening, I
had to present the actors with a partially new script, and take them through
the new dialogue.
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| "Why did you do it lad- run off without saying anything? Jeannie cried for days" |
The
guilt I felt at putting them through this was only assuaged by the real
improvement. They were amazingly good-natured about it, but it was not what
they were used to. In fact the acting became easier for them, as the emotions
rang truer, so I suppose this compensated for having to learn some extra lines.
However,
we realised that this was our fault as writers- we had worked too quickly, and
in a somewhat haphazard way. We should have been more efficient and ruthless
with the text, and perhaps we should have asked Rick to do even more thorough
read-throughs than he did. When the actors asked me if we could swap the order of the last two scenes, I reluctantly agreed to try it - and this was the night before the first performance! But they were right, and we had been wrong- an illustration of how theatre is so much more than the script, and how, as writers, we can't afford to be too precious about our work. Ultimately it's the actors who deliver our ideas to the audience, and we need to listen to them!
Lessons
learned? Probably fewer writers would have been better. Some were more
committed to the idea of team- writing than others and there were genuine,
though not insurmountable difficulties, which led to inconsistencies. Would I do
it again? Oh yes- in fact the club have asked me for a play to celebrate their
60th anniversary next year. I/we have learnt by our mistakes, and I can't wait to
get stuck in!
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| "Fiona lass- if this throstle could sing, she'd have some tales to tell!" |
