Category: Hannah Foden

With so many different and passionate personalities in Forefront we had an understandably bumpy start. However, I am extremely proud that such a large group were able to turn everything around in the last two or three weeks and create a good performance. Aside from a couple of nervous stumbles with the songs and a timing issue in “I Want”, I feel that we created a piece to be proud of and it generated many laughs throughout and positive reviews from our audience. I have found that working in such a large group was although difficult at times, a very rewarding experience where we have all grown close as a group and been able to work collaboratively.

As a writer I feel that my skills have improved as aside from a module last term, I have not had any previous experience writing a script. I am very proud of the final product and the long process undertaken to reach it. Everyone should be very satisfied with our first and final performance of Shoes to Fill as Forefront Theatre Company.

 

Samuals, O. (2015) First Cast Photo

 

Copy of the final script

Shoes To Fill 10 – Final

 

Hannah.

Early on in the process, we all agreed that a particular point of interest was verbatim, a fascinating ‘form of documentary theatre which is based on the spoken words of real people’ (Drama Online, 2015). We wanted to interview people with a range of ages, taking into consideration people from different eras and cultures and how their views on growing up and adulthood varied. This then later developed into collecting stories finding stories from people which all fit into our five sections or chapters of Shoes to Fill. These five chapters were the stereotypical milestones in one’s life, the parts of life that a person should “usually” conform to: growing up, going to university or finding a job, finding “the one”, becoming a parent and growing old.

We interviewed family and friends and then selected stories that were relevant to this performance structure and they were placed into the appropriate chapters:  a story from an older lady speaking about her desire to be a nurse from a young age and a recorded interview from a young man who works with his father both fitted nicely into the chapter about whether to choose to go to university or get a job. In the finding “the one” section, we selected an interview from a Sikh woman who was able to escape the threat of a forced marriage and the obstacles she overcame and another from a senior citizen remembering how she met her late husband and that they remained together even though they were followers of conflicting religions. The following fit into the becoming a parent section: a story from a Bosnian man who unexpectedly became a father and was later able to get his daughter out of a war-torn country and a selection about the trials and joys of becoming a parent and lastly one about a man who became part of an already formed family with three grown up children and his journey to being accepted as one of them.

I left a couple of the verbatim pieces alone such as the nurse and the forced marriage ones as they were taken straight from recorded interviews and were not sent to us in written form. Some of the others had grammatical issues that in places did not work so I edited them slightly, removing parts that did not make sense – see the two attached documents which clearly show the original paragraphs and the final edited ones that featured in our piece. I also chose to mostly leave the Bosnia scene as it was decided that it would help create a sense of character, allowing a natural accent to come through the language and not a potentially stereotypical or offensive one created by the actors.

 

Nurse Verbatim – length only edited

 

Forced Marriage Verbatim – barely edited

 

Religion Original Verbatim

Religion Verbatim – edited

 

Original Verbatim – Parenthood

Parenthood Verbatim Edited (in final)

 

Bosnia Verbatim – barely edited

 

Original Step-Parent Verbatim

Step-Parent Verbatim -edited

 

Hannah.

 

*The above attachments were added at a later date now that they are complete as well as the details regarding them in the above blog – this date shown was when they were were decided upon.*

 

Works Cited

Drama Online (2015) Verbatim theatre. [online] UK: Bloomsbury. Available from http://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/genres/verbatim-theatre-iid-2551 [Accessed  19 April 2015].

From the very start of the rehearsal process we loved our paper marketing manager, Hope’s script that she wrote for another module. Originally a feminist piece, myself and Ollie took this script and edited it to make it fit more with Shoes to Fill. It went through many edits from the original script, which I have attached below. The second version was similar to the original but edited by myself to utilise more characters and fairly include one of each gender to have each personality instead of seeming to conform to the stereotype of an overly-flirty girl or boy. For the read-through of our original script, the tinder scene was heavily added to so that it matched the family-based running storyline that I have previously explained about. However, this did not work and so it was decided we should return to the second draft but with the clever decision by Ollie to add more emojis into the scene for comedic effect. The fourth attachment is what was shown in our performance.

Tinder scenes ORIGINAL

Tinder scene EDITED

Tinder Scene FINAL (taken to read-through)

Final tinder scene in performance

 

Hannah.

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.

THEATRE COMP SCRIPT

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.

Monologue Laces 1

MONOLOGUE LACES PART 2

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. **

SHOES TO FILL 4

 

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.

Through line fears

 

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).

These were key ideas we all came up with in the early stages:

• Wanting to fill the shoes of a parent/guardian/sibling
• Being scared of filling the shoes of a parent/guardian due to personal reasons within the relationship, perhaps an addiction
• Feeling restricted and forced to fill the shoes that society deems as the “norm” – one’s sexuality perhaps, going to university
• Looking up to celebrities in the media or television/film characters – wanting to fill the shoes of a role model, fictitious or real – the ideal life

A poem had previously been written by Clare, our lighting designer, about someone feeling like that had to go to university but even though they have certain adult qualities, they would rather be a child again. I slightly edited this poem and added the final verses, which are highlighted in blue in the attachment below, to also relate to the notion of feeling worried and intimidated to fill other people’s shoes.

University Poem – edited

 

Hannah.