When This Is Over (NHB Modern Plays) E-Book

Ned Glasier

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 106

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

A group of teenagers, their lives shaped by billions of seemingly random events going back to before they were born, come together onstage to share stories about their past, their present, and what might lie ahead. When This Is Over is a uniquely personal, theatrical celebration of hope, possibility and imagination. It's about how we can work with chaos, and embrace our collective imagination as we prepare for a deeply uncertain future – together. Originally conceived by Company Three – and developed alongside more than fifty other youth theatres across the UK – When This Is Over is a play designed to be created and performed by teenage casts, drawing directly on their own life experiences and the stories they want to tell. As with Company Three's widely performed youth-theatre play Brainstorm, the script is a blueprint for an amazing theatrical adventure. This published edition contains a series of exercises and activities for schools, youth-theatre groups and community companies to create and perform their own unique productions, and also features the complete script of Company Three's version, which was performed at The Yard, London, in 2022. When This Is Over was named Community Project of the Year at The Stage Awards, and Outstanding Drama Initiative at the Music and Drama Education Awards.

Leseprobe

WHEN THIS IS OVER

A Blueprint for Creating Your Own Production by Ned Glasier and Company Three

Including the Playscript of the Original Production created by Ned Glasier and Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey with Bailey Charalambous, Shilton Freeman, Mackenzie Gardiner, Allegresse Kabuya and Love Ọmọlọla

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

Contents

About When This Is Over

The Blueprint

The Original Playscript

About the Authors

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

About the Play

When This Is Over is a play about the past, the present and the future. It’s about hope and imagination; about living through a pandemic and facing a climate crisis. Perhaps most of all, it’s about chaos and chance: the billions of seemingly random events that have led inexorably to us all being here right now.

For many young people, chaos can be a scary concept. We educate them in very linear and restrictive ways and pretend (often with the very best of intentions) that life is straightforward – you go to school, you get a job, fall in love, and so on – even though we know that’s not how things work.

When This Is Over is a celebration of how we might accept and work with chaos and the connections it creates, rather than denying it. It is about how embracing our collective imagination might help us prepare for a deeply uncertain future – together.

About the Project

When This Is Over was born in the first Covid-19 lockdown in Spring 2020. During that lockdown, Company Three created a digital project called The Coronavirus Time Capsule (www.coronavirustimecapsule.com) – a video record of the pandemic, created by more than three thousand teenagers in seventeen different countries around the world. Each week the Time Capsule had a different topic to explore. Week Nine was called ‘When This Is Over…’ and in it we invited young people to talk about all the things they were looking forward to doing after the lockdown had been lifted.

By August, we were able to meet Company Three members in person again. It was the first time any of us had seen each other in real life for four months. We marked out a hall with white tape to stop people going within two metres of each other. Everyone had their own sterilised pencil case and notebook. We wore masks when moving around.

In one of those workshops, Love, who would go on to co-create and perform When This Is Over, told us how much she’d been thinking about parallel universes. She felt like lockdown had closed off different pathways in life for her – it made her feel like she was living in a different universe. She wrote a multiverse eulogy for herself, as if she had died at some point in the future – imagining all the different lives she might have led.

That eulogy was our starting point when we brought Love and some other young people together to start work on the play. We started to imagine making something that told the stories of the cast’s lives, from birth until the present moment and then beyond, all the way into the future. At that point it felt like we were at the intersection of the pandemic and the climate emergency. We all felt deeply uncertain about what the future held.

Inspired by the connections we’d made during The Coronavirus Time Capsule, we opened up our making process, working in collaboration with sixteen other youth theatres to develop the play. The leaders met up to share practice on Zoom and young people from each of the companies came together from across the UK in what we called ‘Gatherings’ – huge online workshops led by guest artists like Inua Ellams and campaigners like Letters to the Earth.

We collated exercises and ideas about the play into a draft blueprint and shared it with a further fifty youth theatres. Each of those groups developed their own version of When This Is Over in the autumn of 2021, at just the moment that world leaders were gathering for the COP26 Conference in Glasgow.

Back at Company Three, we were were getting ready to share our final version at the Unicorn Theatre. Except, of course, the pandemic wasn’t over. Two days into tech, some of the cast and production team got Covid. It was impossible to do the performances and we were forced to cancel the entire run. It was devastating.

Two weeks later, we managed to produce a script-in-hand run for a small audience at the National Youth Theatre’s rehearsal space. It wasn’t the production we hoped for, but it convinced us that it was worth doing properly.

Nearly a year later we came back together. We did some intensive R&D while in residence at the 10th International Drama in Education Research Institute Conference at Warwick University. It was there that we first started talking about chance and chaos, which became key themes in the new version of the show.

That show was finally performed at The Yard Theatre in November 2022, more than two years after Love had first written her multiverse eulogy. It had changed a lot from the version we (nearly) made for the Unicorn Theatre, because the cast had changed a lot. That’s the beauty of the play – it’s a record of who people are and what they might become, so it changes every time it is made and performed.

At Company Three we want to share everything we do to help teenagers everywhere tell their own stories and create change. We have written this blueprint to help young people everywhere explore the ways their lives are affected by chance events (big and small) and to accept and embrace chaos, rather than fighting it. We hope it helps audiences understand that chaos, and the way it connects us all, is a source of great hope for the future.

*

When This Is Over was developed as part of a collaborative project involving sixteen other youth theatres, many of whom produced their own versions of the play based on a draft digital blueprint created by Ned Glasier and Company Three, and published by Nick Hern Books.

These groups had a profound impact on the development of the project, our final production and this published blueprint. They are:

Beyond Face

Birmingham Repertory Theatre Young Rep

Caerphilly Youth Theatre

Camden Youth Theatre

Firefly Arts

Growtheatre

Gulbenkian Youth Theatre

hidden route

Make/Sense Theatre

Mortal Fools

Octagon Theatre

Phosphoros Theatre

The Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester Young Company

Tobacco Factory Theatres

Turrets Youth Theatre

Warts and All Theatre

Links to each of these groups can be found on the When This Is Over page of the Company Three website: www.companythree.co.uk/wtio

About Company Three

Company Three is a leading force for change for teenagers in our local community and around the world. We are a theatre company led by the ideas of our members aged eleven to nineteen. We recruit our members through deep-rooted relationships locally and share our practice globally to impact teenagers everywhere.

Working in Islington, North London, we make transformative theatre through long-term collaboration between young people and professional theatre-makers. Our plays have been performed at the National Theatre, Battersea Arts Centre, The Yard Theatre and New Diorama Theatre. Our work has been featured extensively on national television and radio. We became an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation in 2023.

Our play blueprints have been produced by more than three hundred youth theatre groups across the world and we have trained thousands of artists and practitioners through our acclaimed courses and university teaching. In 2020 we brought more than three hundred youth theatres in seventeen countries together to make The Coronavirus Time Capsule (www.coronavirustimecapsule.com). The When This Is Over project won Community Project of the Year at the 2022 Stage Awards and Outstanding Drama Initiative at the 2022 Music and Drama Education Awards.

At Company Three we believe youth theatre can be a place of community, radical art and social change. Despite our global reach, we are fiercely loyal to and are proud to work with the young people of Islington about the issues which affect them most.

Artistic Director: Ned Glasier

Executive Director: Becky Martin

Executive Director (maternity cover): Katie Burse

Associate Artistic Director: Nuna Sandy

Associate Artists: Gavin Joseph and Amber Ruby

Project Manager: Angie Peña Arenas

Company Associates: Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and Emily Lim

Board of Trustees: Natasha Bonnelame, Hannah D’Aguiar, Silvia Dobrivich, Tarek Iskander and Timothy Power

Company Three is grateful for the support of the following organisations:

Arts Council England, Children in Need, Creative Spirit Fund, Cripplegate Foundation, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Garfield Weston Foundation, the Henry Smith Charity, Islington Council, the Lightbulb Trust, the Mercers’ Charitable Company, Tuixen Foundation, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Sumners Foundation, the Victoria Wood Foundation and all our #C3Friends.

For more information about our work, and to get in touch, go to www.companythree.co.uk

Performing Rights

You need to obtain a licence from Nick Hern Books to make and perform your own version of When This Is Over. Please see the information on page ii on how to do this.

Any production of When This Is Over should include the following credit on all publicity and other material:

Inspired by Company Three’s original production, created by Ned Glasier, Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and the company, and created using the When This Is Over Blueprint by Ned Glasier and Company Three.

Please include the following note in any programme or similar material you produce:

This production has been created using the When This Is Over Blueprint by Ned Glasier and Company Three, based on Company Three’s original production created by Ned Glasier, Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and the company. For more information, please go to www.companythree.co.uk/wtio

We’d love to hear about your journey as you make your own When This Is Over. Please feel free to share your process, photos and thoughts with us:

[e-mail] / [e-mail]

Twitter     @company_three / @nedglasier

Instagram     @companythree

WHEN THIS IS OVER

The Blueprint

Ned Glasier and Company Three

This blueprint contains everything you need to make your own version of When This Is Over, based on the stories of the group of young people you are working with.

It is divided into the following sections:

The Basics Things to know before you get started.

Stage OneGathering the Stories How to gather the stories you’ll need for the script.

Story-Gathering Exercises Exercises and activities to gather stories from your cast.

Stage TwoWriting the Script A guide to writing the script.

Scene-by-Scene Breakdown A breakdown of all the scenes, with specific advice on how to write each one.

If you have never devised or written a play with a group of young people before, it might be better to stay close to the exercises and structures we’ve written, but you do not have to follow all or any of them. We encourage you to use your imagination, craft and experience to innovate, adapt and find new ways of making the different scenes. We recognise you’re making it in a different place, a different time and with different young people. The most important thing is that they feel like it belongs to them. If your play looks very different to ours and you’re happy with it, then that’s great.

The Basics

Plot Overview

A group of teenagers come onto the stage. They say hello to the audience and ask them how they got to the theatre tonight – and why they came.

The teenagers start telling us the stories of their lives so far. They talk in the third person and the past tense, as if they are someone else recounting their story from the future.

They tell us about the events that led to them being born, about their births and their first moments in the world. They tell us about their childhoods, starting school, making friends, and learning about the world. They tell us about major and minor events that changed their lives, their hopes for the future and the world that has made them who they are today.

They talk about the Covid pandemic and what it was like for them.

As we get closer to the present, they tell us about how they feel about the world. What they’ve learnt, what they’re worried about and what they’re hoping for in the future. They talk about chaos and how it has brought them all together to make this play.

When we reach the present, they tell the story of the time they performed When This Is Over