Joanne E-Book

Deborah Bruce

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Five characters share a common thread: Joanne. But it's not about her. It's about Stella, whose tomorrow is as far away as winter from summer. It's the way Grace finds her song on the footpath between two cars. It's about Alice's MBA wasted on plugging holes, Kath's patients crawling alongside her after the night shift and it's Becky caught in the crosshairs of what's best and what's right for her students. But what about her? What about Joanne? In Joanne, five of the most exciting voices in theatre explore the pressures on our public services as one young woman buckles under pressures of her own. The play comprises five interconnected short plays for a solo performer, written by Deborah Bruce, Theresa Ikoko, Laura Lomas, Chino Odimba and Ursula Rani Sarma. Commissioned by Clean Break, Joanne premiered at Latitude Festival in 2015, before transferring to Soho Theatre, London.

Leseprobe

JOANNE

five monologues

Deborah Bruce

Theresa Ikoko

Laura Lomas

Chino Odimba

Ursula Rani Sarma

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Original Production

Introduction by Róisín McBrinn

Stella    Chino Odimba

Grace    Ursula Rani Sarma

Kathleen    Deborah Bruce

Alice    Theresa Ikoko

Becky    Laura Lomas

About the Authors

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Joanne was first performed at Latitude Festival on 19 July 2015, with Tanya Moodie performing all five monologues. It transferred to Soho Theatre, London, on 13 October 2015.

Director

Róisín McBrinn

Designer

Lucy Osborne

Lighting Designer

Emma Chapman

Sound Designer

Becky Smith

Introduction

We commissioned Joanne in early 2015 to be performed at Latitude Festival. At that time, the run-up to the General Election was underway and there was media saturation of rhetoric around cuts, cuts, cuts. We were offering additional and emergency support services at Clean Break (including emergency housing clinics and food-bank vouchers) in order to compensate for pressure on almost all the essential external services that are used by women attending our theatre-education programme. In addition, the backdrop to these pressures was reduced access to legal aid and a probation service undergoing privatisation. I began to see the women employees who are the ‘faces’ of our public services as the front line of a very brittle army, kept fighting through good will and human endurance. Inspired by this, I wanted to create a piece of theatre that looks at the fallout of this continuing unsustainable system – to look at the pressure on the front line and where it actually implodes. Joanne is the invisible fall out. Through the pressures on public services, the person that arguably needs these resources the most, gets lost and in some way disappears.

Joanne is a young woman, who shares her story with the women we work with day in day out at Clean Break and in women’s prisons. The challenge of the production was to create something that purposefully excluded Joanne’s voice whilst also ensuring that this was a virtue and not a loss. We worked with Clean Break’s Student Support Team to create a timeline for our ‘Jo Bloggs’. It was important that there were multiple times in her young trajectory that Joanne could have been helped with the right intervention, and that this woman’s pathway to prison and beyond was one that could have been diverted. I then worked with our five commissioned writers to explore the central twenty-four hours that the play focuses on and to consider the women that Joanne comes into contact with. Our writers – Deborah, Theresa, Laura, Ursula and Chino – then went and spoke to women who work in their chosen characters’ professions. It was important that each writer had an autonomous voice in the process whilst also trying to ensure the five pieces hung together and became fuller as a whole.

Having Deborah, Theresa, Ursula, Laura and Chino working on this project was a real thrill for the company. Not only are they each writers that Clean Break admires hugely, it was also wonderful to gain so many different insights into a single arena and event. Part of the aim of the project was to explore the diversity of lives and pressures on service-led women’s employment. Inviting Tanya Moodie to join this cohort of stellar female artists seemed a natural progression. She has extended each of these voices with her wonderful collaborative spirit and great talent and hopefully left Joanne’s absence very present for you at a time when she urgently needs to be visible.

Róisín McBrinn, October 2015Director, JoanneHead of Artistic Programme, Clean Break