I had the opportunity to write my own piece of Theatre in Education (TIE) theatre whilst working on my Independent Practice and Research project. I created this piece surrounding mental health, in hope to show the audience signs and solutions to help advise people they know or themselves if they have bad mental health. Mental health is a very taboo subject and I want to raise awareness to people that it is ok to speak up and get help. I was used to devising scripts, however, never had the opportunity to write a piece of theatre from scratch. I found this quite difficult to do with little stimulus to start with, however I later began to realise that this is part of the process. It is a proud feeling to watch back a play that you have created from start to finish by yourself. I have always loved writing in my spare time and always made up plays and stories as a child, and it was a proud moment to have my own words projected to an audience.
I had to be very careful how I approached mental health and the scenes I wrote, because the language had to be appropriate, especially because the piece was aimed it at children and young people, so I had to be sensitive about how the mental illnesses were shown and symptoms were displayed. I also had to announce a trigger warning before the piece to allow audience members to choose whether they were comfortable to watch it or if they wanted to leave. This is important, because no artist would want to be a reason for someone feeling uncomfortable.
To start this process off I did some writing tasks to help me get thinking about how to put the script together, such as, Continuous writing where I wrote for a 3 minutes about the topic ‘Mental health’ without taking my pen off the paper; whether that was words or phrases; and worked from that. This allowed me to find different topics within the main topic of ‘Mental health’ and play around with different material I was slowly starting to create. I also read a book by Rib David called ‘Writing dialogue for scripts’ which allowed me to learn about how to write a good script, such as, naturalistic dialogue, characters agendas and tone, pace and conflict. This helped me to keep to the same language, so, in this piece the characters were ‘common’ as it was set in the north, I was able to keep the ‘common’ language but allow it to still make sense.
I struggled with writer’s block during the process because I was too caught up in the script and thinking about what was coming next. I resolved this by taking a step back away from writing the script, and decided to work on character building with each of the actors and their characters. I gave them some questions and we worked through each of them to build on the character and go into depth about their traits, likes and dislikes and families etc. Having this break from the script allowed me to have more stimulus to work with in order to develop and create more scenes, and going in with a fresh mind allowed me to work better and keep focused and on track.
Davis, R (2016). writing dialogue for scripts. 4th ed. [London: Bloomsbury].