For our performance of Shoes to Fill we have two brilliant writers. They are both good at what they do, yet they have very different writing styles. One of them perfectly captures the serious and the other captures the humorous parts of life. This worked massively in our favour.
As a company we decided we wanted a script which both used our words and those of real people. This meant thinking of a structure where we could include all this information and still have the piece make sense. So I started to think of how we could do this successfully. I thought about all the verbatim pieces we were collecting and started to think about how we could link them all in.
We had written our copy by this point and so I knew it needed to reflect this. There was a word that stood out and remained in my head and that was ‘expectations’. I started to think about and write down simple things, such as; ‘Married life is great!’ and then I would think about the possible reality of this, for example, ‘He stopped saying that after buying his wife’s tampax for the third time’. I then thought about the expectations people have for their lives and the expectations society has for people. From this I created a structure, which I ran by the writers and performers and everyone agreed with.The structure would be built on the five expectations not only I, but others feel they should fulfill in order to have lived life ‘correctly’ according to society. They are: grow up okay, go to uni or get a job, find the one, become a parent and grow old.
I wanted to put on stage a piece that tests what we know using subtly and humour and I think this structure will do that.
Tamsyn.