Life Raft E-Book

Fin Kennedy

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Modern Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 145

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

– Every man for himself. – I'd say we're better off sticking together. In a mysterious dystopia, against a backdrop of war, a life raft filled with children is adrift at sea – their passenger liner sunk by an unknown and unseen enemy. As darkness falls and their rations dwindle, fear, superstition and madness start to take hold. Hours turn into days, and it becomes clear that not all of them will make it back to dry land alive... Life Raft is a thrilling contemporary adaptation of The Raft of the Medusa, Georg Kaiser's 1945 play, written during his exile from Nazi Germany, and inspired by a terrifying true story. Written by Fin Kennedy in collaboration with Bristol Old Vic's acclaimed Young Company, and originally performed by them under the direction of Melly Still, this large-cast play for young actors is a dark study in the psychology of survival – and an urgent allegory for our times. This definitive edition of the play is accompanied by a series of interactive games specially created by award-winning games designer Tassos Stevens, allowing young people a deeper exploration of the play's themes, and the opportunity to create their own new stories inspired by the scenario.

Leseprobe

Fin Kennedy

LIFE RAFT

after Georg Kaiser’s The Raft of the Medusa

with interactive gamesby Tassos Stevensand Fin Kennedy

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Original Production Details

Characters

A Note on Staging

Life Raft

Life Raft: The Games

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Foreword

Tom Morris Artistic Director of Bristol Old Vic, 2009–2022

It seems like a world away. The red-trousered philanthropist George Ferguson was elected as Bristol’s first mayor in 2012, and his team put together a bid for the city to be Britain’s first Green Capital. The roots of Bristol’s Green revolution had been growing for decades, and in 2015 the year-long celebration was launched. Ferguson had asked Manchester Festival Director Alex Poots about the role of culture in city regeneration and as a result had insisted that Bristol’s creative industries be drawn into the planning. Within the same week, Arcadia’s Spider spouted green fire into the skies above Queen’s Square, and Bristol Old Vic opened an ambitious play created for and with young people from across the region.

The project was the idea of the director Melly Still, and its text was a reimagination of Georg Kaiser’s The Raft of the Medusa, here published for the first time as Fin Kennedy’s Life Raft. Asking daring questions about the social consequences of climate change, the production resonated as a cry from the hearts of the young people onstage to the generation in power to avert climate catastrophe. It was a prophetic piece of theatre and its message is more urgent today than it has ever been.

Melly Still Director of Life Raft, 2015

The original cast will be in their twenties now – and I can’t help but wonder what memories they have of the summer we delved into this starkly prescient play. And what do I recall? A luminous group of young people joyously confident of commanding the main stage of the Bristol Old Vic. In fact, they began their story by clambering over the seats of the audience as if clinging on to ocean flotsam in a bid to reach their life raft. They were tirelessly playful and serious in their grasp of character; backstories were detailed and discussions around the themes were invigorating.

The life raft in the story is full of survivors between the ages of eight and thirteen, and having no other references, they act out their adult role models, initially adopting their belief systems as they try to work out how to survive. Sawn-off chairs and crates – angled to give the impression of bobbing hazardously in water – litter the stage and become symbols of an established hierarchy in the group. Those at the bottom are at the mercy of those at the top. Superstition versus reason dominates their discussions, and inevitably scapegoating and its accompanying rituals come into focus.

Looking back, it’s striking that this production took place before social media and its unstable moral core began to orchestrate cultural camps, because the behaviour underpinning this is something the play investigates unflinchingly. And in a world that, ten years on, needs no reminding of what a life raft looks like, Fin Kennedy’s incisive adaptation shifts from Georg Kaiser’s denkspiel (a play about an idea or a mind game) and shines a light on the fears and hopes of the people on board. And being ten years older myself, I can’t help but think of those people as our children and grandchildren…

IntroductionFin Kennedy

When director Melly Still first asked me to read Georg Kaiser’s The Raft of the Medusa, I couldn’t help but be struck by its bleakness.

It is a play about survival – and about human nature. But far from being about optimism, cooperation or triumph in adversity, it is about survival’s dark side: madness, paranoia, and the desperate need for control. The play examines how, under the pressure-cooker circumstances of a life-and-death situation, these instincts can cause us to turn on one another with lethal consequences, and how even the most innocent of us – children – are not immune.

The Raft of the Medusa was German playwright Georg Kaiser’s last play. Written in 1945, when he was in exile from Nazi Germany, it takes place on a lifeboat adrift in the Atlantic, filled with children after a passenger liner carrying British evacuees to Canada was torpedoed by German U-boats. Undiscovered for seven days, the thirteen children become obsessed with the idea that their number means they are cursed, and that only some kind of chilling sacrifice will save them. It was Kaiser’s last play before he died, and reflects his despair at seeing the civilised world he thought he knew tear itself apart.

It was shocking to discover that these events were based on a true story. In September 1940, the steam-turbine ocean liner SS City of Benares left Liverpool for Canada. It was an evacuee ship carrying ninety children among 408 passengers and crew. Four days into its journey, in a remote part of the Atlantic, 630 miles from the nearest inhabited land, the Benares was spotted by a German U-boat and struck by two torpedoes. It sank in thirty-one minutes, with the loss of 260 lives, including seventy-seven of the evacuated children, aged five to thirteen years old. The sinking caused such outrage in Britain that it led to Winston Churchill cancelling the government’s international evacuation programme in its entirety.

One of the Benares’ lifeboats was indeed adrift for a week before being found, though the story that only children were on board appears to have been Kaiser’s invention. In reality, there were only six boys aged eleven to thirteen, along with around forty adults, a mixture of chaperones, paying passengers and the ship’s crew. They had food for three weeks but only one week’s fresh water. They were eventually spotted by an RAF sea plane, and rescued by a naval destroyer. Individual survivors’ stories proved impossible to find, but neither was there any evidence of things turning macabre on board in the way that Kaiser imagines.

But as a writer, he had found his allegory. The idea was a powerful device to anatomise the psychological weaknesses in all human beings, which had so recently destroyed Kaiser’s own nation. In locating the action among children, war becomes an adult curse that the children do not understand, yet are doomed to repeat. The play is a searing indictment of the world of which these children are a product.

In creating the contemporary adaptation that became Life Raft, this historical material was a useful stimulus for a workshop week with Bristol Old Vic’s Young Company. We deconstructed Kaiser’s original text and built it back up again, adding more detail and personality to each of the characters than Kaiser had. (In his original, with the exception of Allan, Ann and Foxy, all the children simply have numbers rather than names.)

We also made two important further changes: The first was to elide Allan and Ann’s culpability for the ending. In the original, Ann was the manipulative and malevolent force, with Allan the innocent, though impotent, saviour. In our version, it is the nexus between the two of them that is to blame. (We also swapped which of them experiences the great howl of regret at the end.)

The second big change was a steer from Bristol Old Vic’s then artistic director, Tom Morris. Tom felt that the 1940’s setting potentially let a modern audience dismiss it as a period piece – that the events in this context, though horrifying, could easily be written off as the baffling behaviour of a different age, when superstition was more powerful and people more easily led.

For Kaiser, there was nothing baffling about human beings turning on one another in the most brutal way. Indeed, he had in turn taken his title from an 1819 painting by French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault, depicting the aftermath of another real-world naval wreck, when the desperate crew resorted to cannibalism.

Any adaptation that is to remain true to Kaiser’s original intent would need to implicate its contemporary viewers as powerfully as these two historical predecessors. And so it was that we alighted on a slightly timeless, though clearly modern, near-future dystopia, in which the children have grown up against a backdrop of a nameless war so long-lasting that none of them can remember anything else.

Melly Still’s inspired original production for Bristol Old Vic’s Young Company did not make for easy viewing, not least because all the roles were played by child actors of the same age. But nor was it without hope. There are moments of kindness and selflessness. The fundamental decency that is children’s default mode, in the play becomes a bulwark against which the forces of hysteria must pit themselves for some time before they prevail. Perhaps with another roll of the dice, things would have turned out differently. Our children’s innate grace remains our best hope.

I’m delighted that this published edition is accompanied by three new interactive games for groups, inspired by the world of the play and created by award-winning games designer Tassos Stevens:

The Biscuit Game takes the isolation of the lifeboat, with its limited supply of food, and unknowable rescue date, to introduce a playable scenario about the politics of survival.

Angel Academy introduces the role of storytellers to shape the events and tempo of a plot.

A Life Well Played provides a thoughtful framework for actors involved in an improvisation to assess afterwards how well they conveyed their characters’ values, persona and relationships.

All three will not only enrich any young actor’s experience of the play, they also serve as an introduction to game design for young performers, which is also of course an introduction to devising new stories. Intended for use either by young casts rehearsing the play, or as a stimulus for entirely new improvisations, the ingenious yet simple game mechanics created by Tassos Stevens and colleagues allow for an open world in which players must negotiate and make moral choices of their own.

Particular thanks are due to the three schools who helped us playtest these games during the summer of 2024: Whitmore School, Harrow, and teacher Signe Reinhold; Bishop Douglass School, Barnet, and teacher Erin Holland; and Mulberry School for Girls, and teachers Alison Hargreaves and Dawn Reid.

In this way, I hope we have opened up Georg Kaiser’s powerful story as a contemporary arena in which infinite future possibilities can play out.

Some, I hope, will have happier endings.

Life Raft was first performed by the Young Company at Bristol Old Vic Theatre on 2 September 2015, with the following cast:

MARGARET

Alyssa Thomas

MARGOT

Tilly Bennett

ANTHEA

Beth Carriaga

ENID

Courtnei-Violet Danks

SAM

Callum Harrison-Deans

ARCHIE

Llewy Godfrey

ROGER

Jacob Bishop

FOXY

Charlie Cleaver

ALLAN

Toby Yapp

ALFIE

Oscar Adams

ANN

Amy Kemp

GEORGE

Kai Ball

AMY

Iris Supple-Still

ADULTS (non-speaking)

Fionn Gill Zara Ramm

Director

Melly Still

Set and Costume Designer

Max Johns

Lighting Designer

Tim Streader

Sound and Composition

Dave Price

Costume Supervisor

Pam Tait

Production Manager

David Miller

Assistant Directors

Miriam Battye James Kent

Characters

ALLAN, fourteen, thinker, impressionable, reluctant leader

ANN, thirteen, cocky, confident, frightened

GEORGE, twelve, caring, jealous, easily led

ALFIE, thirteen, gruff, stubborn, physically strong

ARCHIE, twelve, gentle, kind, terrified

ROGER, thirteen, chivalrous, logical, sceptical

SAM, twelve, laddy, gullible, daydreamer

MARGARET, twelve, hysterical, competitive, afraid

MARGOT, eleven, immature, obedient, religious

ENID, thirteen, pugnacious, superior, judgemental

ANTHEA, eleven, kind, innocent, practical

AMY, eleven, introverted, traumatised, seriously injured

FOXY, nine, shell-shocked, silent, bright-red hair

Note: All these parts should be played by actors as close to the characters’ ages as possible.

Setting

The action takes place over six days on board a lifeboat adrift at sea. It is inspired by a true story.

A Note on Staging

I would encourage any young company performing this play to find their own imaginative staging solutions to the effects called for in the script. For example, it may not be necessary to build a mock-up of a real lifeboat (and indeed to do so could restrict, rather than serve, the dramatic action – not to mention audience sightlines). Be bold, be theatrical. Impressionistic techniques are fine.

There is also the opportunity for each company to devise their own dream sequences between each scene. This is of course not compulsory, but remember that each scene is one day, so each interlude between scenes must be the night-time. In the original 2015 production at Bristol Old Vic, directed by Melly Still, we saw non-verbal dream sequences dreamt by four different characters and one ‘shared’ dream featuring everyone. These sections were highly stylised and increasingly nightmarish as the play goes on. I have not included descriptions of them in the script because I do not want to be prescriptive, and in any case I challenge you to find your own.

The only note I would give is that they should rely on imagery, sound, music and movement more than spoken text. They could also involve some additional non-speaking cast members who do not play one of the characters on board. These actors could be older, for example if one of the characters dreams about an older sibling, or their parents.

Prologue

Darkness.

The sound of the sea. Distantly, the sound of a war. The sound of the wind.

The sound of the sea. Darkness.

Day One

A damp, grey dawn. Mist rises from a restless sea. A lifeboat fades into view. On its deck are huddled twelve children, in various positions of sleep: six boys and six girls aged between eleven and fourteen.

The eldest boy wears a white woollen scarf – this is ALLAN.

The eldest girl clutches a red Thermos flask tightly to her chest – this is ANN. The boat bobs gently as the sea sighs.

ANN is the first to wake. She sits up and looks around her slowly, fearfully – is this a dream? She surveys her sleeping companions. She looks out to the sea, and back again. Her lip wobbles, rising to a silent scream. She clutches herself tightly as she rocks back and forth. This cannot be real, this cannot be real…

She becomes aware of how tightly she is clutching the Thermos. She calms herself and loosens her grip. She unscrews the top, which is also a cup, fills it from the flask and drinks.

ALLAN awakes. He too surveys his surroundings slowly, with understated horror, until he notices ANN. Their eyes meet.

ANN. What’s the matter?

ALLAN. Nothing.

Pause.

ANN. Want some?

ANN holds up the cup.

ALLAN. Yes please.

ANN pours.

What is it?

ANN. Milk.

ALLAN. Oh.

ANN. Too big for a cup of milk?

ALLAN. I didn’t say that.

ANN finishes pouring and holds out the cup. ALLAN drinks.

It’s warm.

ANN. That’s the idea.

ALLAN. When did you fill it?

ANN. Last night.

ALLAN. Before…

ANN. Yes, before.

Pause.

ALLAN. I wish I’d thought to save something.

ANN. You saved yourself.

ALLAN. So did you.

ANN. Were you scared?

ALLAN. No. Were you?

ANN. No.

Pause. ANN scans the other sleeping children.

I’d say we’re the oldest here.

ALLAN. How old are you?

ANN. Thirteen. You?

ALLAN. Fourteen.

ANN. That makes you the leader.

ALLAN takes off his scarf and hands it to her.

What for?

ALLAN. It’s what leaders do.

ANN takes it.

Thanks for the milk.

ANN. It isn’t much.

ALLAN. It was kind. You’re a leader too.

ANN. Let’s share.

ALLAN. Can you have two leaders?

ANN. I mean the scarf.

ALLAN. Oh.

ANN. Half and half.

ALLAN. But I barely know you.

ANN. It doesn’t mean we’re engaged or anything.

The scarf is quite long. ANN wraps one end round her neck and one round his. This inevitably brings them a bit closer.

I’m Ann.

ALLAN. Allan.

He offers his hand. She pecks him on the cheek instead. A moment.

ANN. Allan and Ann.

ALLAN. Yes.

ANN. Two As. Must be top of the class.

ALLAN smiles. ANN takes her end of the scarf off.

Save it. You might need it.

ALLAN. Same.

ALLAN hands back the empty milk cup.

ANN. Every man for himself.

ALLAN. I’d say we’re better off sticking together.

The other children start to wake, the boys at first along one side of the boat:

GEORGE, followed by ALFIE, followed by ARCHIE, then ROGER and SAM.

GEORGE. Where are we?

ALFIE. Where does it look like?

ARCHIE. All at sea. What t-time is it?

ROGER (checking watch). Six-thirty. On the dot.

SAM. I need a wee.

GEORGE. Where’s our ship?

ARCHIE. G-gone.

ALFIE. Don’t you remember?

SAM. Boom!

ROGER. I can still taste the smoke.

ARCHIE. M-me too.

ROGER. Yuck.

SAM. I almost died.

ALFIE. We all did.

ALLAN. Well we didn’t. Be thankful.

ALFIE. Who are you?

ALLAN. I’m Allan. This is Ann.

ANN. This is our ship now.

ALFIE. Your ship?

ALLAN. All of us.

ROGER. Until we’re rescued.

ALFIE. When will that be?

ROGER. Soon.

SAM. How do you know?

ROGER. Because who’d leave us here?

SAM. Boom!

GEORGE. Stop it.

SAM. Boom!

GEORGE. Where’s my sister? I need to find my sister. Evie? Evie!