Start Swimming E-Book

James Fritz

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

Seitenzahl: 29

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A play about occupation, revolution and what the future holds for today's youth. One step away from disaster, there's only one thing left to do: start swimming. First staged by the Young Vic Taking Part department, Start Swimming was also performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2017. Ideal for schools, youth theatres and amateur companies to perform, James Fritz's Start Swimming demonstrates an innovative playwright at the top of his craft.

Leseprobe

James Fritz

START SWIMMING

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Original Production

Dedication

Epigraph

Note on Text

Start Swimming

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction to Comment is Free & Start Swimming: Two Plays

It makes me very happy to see these two plays side by side.

Comment Is Free started life at Old Vic New Voices in June 2015, in a staged reading directed by Kate Hewitt and produced by Martha Rose Wilson. In the audience was Becky Ripley, an incredibly talented young radio producer who saw the potential for the play to work as an audio drama. Working closely with Becky I rewrote the text with radio in mind, and the play was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in October 2016.

If you can find a version of the original radio production lurking somewhere on the internet it’s worth having a listen, not least to imagine the long, long hours Becky must have spent in the editing room. Understanding that the feeling of the play’s ‘noise’ is as crucial as its content, she spliced together a hundred different crowdsourced voices who delivered a mixture of written and improvised lines based on the text. The effect was noisy and disorientating in exactly the right way. Anyone thinking about performing this play on stage should feel free to do the same if they so wish – so long as the beats of the story are hit, it’s more important that the noise feels exciting, realistic and terrifying than particularly faithful to the text.

Start Swimming was made incredibly quickly in the spring of 2017 with director Ola Ince and Young Vic Taking Part. Tasked with responding to Paul Mason’s performance and book Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere (which documented the successes and failures of the various protests and revolutions of 2011), Ola and I worked with a group of twelve young people from Lambeth and Southwark to create a new piece that would transfer from the Young Vic to the Edinburgh Fringe. Our aim was to make something that would articulate how our cast felt about growing up marginalised in a major city during a time of incredible political upheaval.

We decided early on to make something that wasn’t specific to any one voice or story in the room, but instead communicated their widely shared feelings of frustration, confusion, anger and powerlessness. This led to the text’s bare, repetitive structure, which in rehearsals (thanks to Ola’s input) was blended with a binary yes/no that would often reset proceedings when the wrong answer was given.

In Ola’s original production – which staged the text in a sort of hellish gameshow, with the cast elevated on light-up boxes that would choose participants at random – the yes’s (Y) were marked by the ding of a bell, the no’s (X) by a buzzer which gave an electric shock to our committed actors. The effect was exhausting to watch in the best possible way, and the cast were some of the most inspiring, talented people I’ve had the pleasure to work with. Each of them took the offer given to them by the play’s blankness and ran with it, stamping their own authority and identity over every word.

I’m excited to discover how those same Ys and Xs might be interpreted differently in the future, and how a new company’s voices and experiences might change the meaning of Start Swimming in ways I can’t imagine.