The read-through took place on this date and myself and Ollie presented an early unfinished draft of a script we had been working on.
We previously conducted an interview with the rest of Forefront to deduce their feelings on the prospect of growing up. One thing that we found particularly interesting were the responses to a question regarding role models. This led us to become intrigued by the idea of how different people feel about filling their parents’ shoes. We collected words such as “proud”, “excited”, “intimidated”, “cautious”, “terrified”. The latter feelings particularly interested us. The notion that someone really does not want to follow in their parents’ footsteps was something that we suddenly felt needed to be explored further, needed to be told. They are attached below but are marked as numbers instead of names for confidentiality reasons. I then used these paragraphs and turned them into part-verbatim, part-created diary entries intended for different characters to say in relation to filling or not filling role model’s shoes.
PARAGRAPHS – numbers 3, 6, 7, 9 were chosen to be made into entries as shown in the doc below.
paragraphs edited into diary entries
The through storyline I came up with developed from the more negative answers we collected. It consisted of two siblings coping with their alcoholic mother and how the eldest, Jo, feared following in her footsteps. We played with the idea of expectations and reality and this was shown in the edited longer version of the tinder scenes, where the parents meet on-line in a cute way and everything seems perfect. This is the way that the mother told her children, to shield them perhaps from the reality. Then later in the script it is revealed that actually this was not true and they were both not the perfect people the mother made them out to be.*
As our subject was shoes, I came up with a metaphor that ran throughout the script. The character of Jo collected shoe laces of all designs (she mentions skull ones for example to foreshadow death) and her holey trainers represented the family gradually falling apart when her father leaves and her mother sinks into alcoholism. I started the whole storyline by writing a couple of monologues regarding this and my notes are still attached detailing my thought processes.
We re-drafted the script as we realised that it was going to be far too difficult to direct as it was too heavy on dialogue. The below version split up a lot of the monologues and many were edited down or removed. **
After interviewing my mother to collect some ideas regarding the fears a parent faces, a created a character who runs through the final script. She appears in each of the five chapters and makes these clear by speaking of her fears regarding the subject of the particular section. She speaks to the audience as if they are her child.
Hannah.
* This was scrapped in the final performance but the expectation versus reality idea remained. Ollie wrote five very humorous scenes that showed exactly this and they fitted into each of the five sections as a different through storyline.
** The final script was very heavily changed regarding my through storyline. It could be seen as complicated so it was simplified to just include two siblings who have a rough childhood with a mother who leaves them and a father who then becomes an alcoholic. The eldest sibling who always tried to protect her younger sister from following in either of their parents’ footsteps, discreetly is part of the final story, represented through a pair of converse on stage (parenting verbatim, final Doctor scene).