In the old Govan Town Hall, twelve young people sit on chairs lined up in a row. Opposite them, a woman asks questions from a 75 page document with smiley faces down the side of each page to encourage those participating in the survey contained within to keep answering. Despite this, each question is written and delivered in state sponsored officialese which, to the vulnerable young people it’s targeted at, can’t help but put them off. As the interrogator continues to quiz her charges on where and how they’d like to live, the information required in order to access the big bad world beyond the institutionalised way of life makes the questionnaire a necessary evil.
This is a snapshot of what went on during early rehearsals for 365, a new work developed and created by the National Theatre of Scotland with playwright David Harrower, and which opens at Edinburgh International Festival this weekend. This look at what the UK’s 70,000 children in care have to go through on the cusp of adult-hood, independence and all the grown-up responsibility that goes with it is very much NTS artistic director Vicky Featherstone’s baby.
“It’s something that’s been at the back of my head for ages,” Featherstone says. “I wanted to do something about how we treat children in society, and how we have this hypocrisy of calling ourselves a civilised country, and yet have this unbelievable child poverty and child misery. But even though I didn’t know what this was about, I knew I didn’t want it to be sentimental. The last thing it could be was some kind of equivalent of a Michael Jackson video.”
A researcher told Featherstone about practice flats, which are a kind of halfway house for young people in care to use as a bridge between living in an institution and becoming totally independent. Something clicked.
“It became about how these young people can possibly be equipped emotionally to live independently. Young people have had such a shit time in care that come sixteen they want to leave. So we’re putting the sticking plaster in the wrong place. Because at sixteen of course everybody wants to leave and have their own place and be an adult, not be in a noisy home full of ten year olds.”
Over the year’s intensive research that followed, Featherstone was clear that 365 wouldn’t be some simplistic piece of social work.
“It’s not like some Ken Loach documentary about the misery,” she says. “For me, these stories don’t need to be treated in a domestic way. The universality of it requires that big stages deal with these ideas. That also relates to the amount of young people who don’t own their own narrative, because their DNA has been fractured and they don’t know what their life is.”
Harrower’s presence as writer was crucial. Featherstone “knew that David wouldn’t give me gritty naturalism. I knew that he would demand that we had to find some other way of creating the response to this material, which wouldn’t be anything to do with verbatim theatre or putting the facts and figures onstage. David never does the obvious. He asks all the difficult questions all the way along, and I knew he would have to find the poetry in the piece before he was able to write it.”
It’s a risky strategy, but it’s one Featherstone willingly embraces.
“The thought of having everything mapped out before us from day one would be really boring,” she maintains. “Doing it this way keeps you alive to what it is, and how important it is watching fourteen people dealing with their lives now.”
Featherstone is adamant, though, that such an approach isn’t about providing therapy.
“We’re not making a piece of theatre for those people who are in care,” she stresses. “We’re making a piece of theatre about what we feel about a situation as we understand it, for people who maybe don’t understand or even know about that situation, which is the majority of the world.”
365, Edinburgh Playhouse, Fri-Mon, 7.30pm, Sat, 2.30pm
www.eif.co.uk
www.nationaltheatrescotland.com
The Herald, August 23rd 2008
ends
07754 756504
This is a snapshot of what went on during early rehearsals for 365, a new work developed and created by the National Theatre of Scotland with playwright David Harrower, and which opens at Edinburgh International Festival this weekend. This look at what the UK’s 70,000 children in care have to go through on the cusp of adult-hood, independence and all the grown-up responsibility that goes with it is very much NTS artistic director Vicky Featherstone’s baby.
“It’s something that’s been at the back of my head for ages,” Featherstone says. “I wanted to do something about how we treat children in society, and how we have this hypocrisy of calling ourselves a civilised country, and yet have this unbelievable child poverty and child misery. But even though I didn’t know what this was about, I knew I didn’t want it to be sentimental. The last thing it could be was some kind of equivalent of a Michael Jackson video.”
A researcher told Featherstone about practice flats, which are a kind of halfway house for young people in care to use as a bridge between living in an institution and becoming totally independent. Something clicked.
“It became about how these young people can possibly be equipped emotionally to live independently. Young people have had such a shit time in care that come sixteen they want to leave. So we’re putting the sticking plaster in the wrong place. Because at sixteen of course everybody wants to leave and have their own place and be an adult, not be in a noisy home full of ten year olds.”
Over the year’s intensive research that followed, Featherstone was clear that 365 wouldn’t be some simplistic piece of social work.
“It’s not like some Ken Loach documentary about the misery,” she says. “For me, these stories don’t need to be treated in a domestic way. The universality of it requires that big stages deal with these ideas. That also relates to the amount of young people who don’t own their own narrative, because their DNA has been fractured and they don’t know what their life is.”
Harrower’s presence as writer was crucial. Featherstone “knew that David wouldn’t give me gritty naturalism. I knew that he would demand that we had to find some other way of creating the response to this material, which wouldn’t be anything to do with verbatim theatre or putting the facts and figures onstage. David never does the obvious. He asks all the difficult questions all the way along, and I knew he would have to find the poetry in the piece before he was able to write it.”
It’s a risky strategy, but it’s one Featherstone willingly embraces.
“The thought of having everything mapped out before us from day one would be really boring,” she maintains. “Doing it this way keeps you alive to what it is, and how important it is watching fourteen people dealing with their lives now.”
Featherstone is adamant, though, that such an approach isn’t about providing therapy.
“We’re not making a piece of theatre for those people who are in care,” she stresses. “We’re making a piece of theatre about what we feel about a situation as we understand it, for people who maybe don’t understand or even know about that situation, which is the majority of the world.”
365, Edinburgh Playhouse, Fri-Mon, 7.30pm, Sat, 2.30pm
www.eif.co.uk
www.nationaltheatrescotland.com
The Herald, August 23rd 2008
ends
07754 756504
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