As Hand Me Down Theatre focus on devising and creating our own work, it was always inevitable that the texts that we chose to bring to workshops were going to be texts that spoke to us on some sort of personal level. It is unsurprising therefore, having eight female members in our company of nine, that a lot of these texts would be based around the subject of femininity and what it is to be female in modern society. While at the beginning of our process we shied away from creating what we believed to be overtly feminist scenes, through our development we have discovered that it would in fact be going against our natural performative nature to shun this feminist notion within our performance.
Having embraced this feminist view point, the last scene that Hand Me Down devised uses text that contains a message that each and every cast member can relate to or have an opinion on as a young woman living in twenty first century, westernised society.
On May 15th 2014, the popular female comedian, Sarah Millican, published an article in her weekly spot in the Radio Times. The article, titled “Don’t Judge Me On My Dress…” describes her personal experience with the public and the press via social media, following her appearance at the Bafta awards in 2013. In the article she discusses how the public, slated her for her outfit and her overall appearance on the red carpet via twitter, and how she was shocked to discover that so many people took such an offense to what she was wearing, as she believed that she was there to be celebrated for being good at her job, not to be judged and compared to other women on the red carpet.
Picture Sourced from Radio Times (May 15 2014). Available from http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2014-05-15/sarah-millican-twitter-was-a-pin-to-my-excitable-bafta-balloon.
This article, which can be found at http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2014-05-15/sarah-millican-twitter-was-a-pin-to-my-excitable-bafta-balloon, spoke to me on a personal level, as I realized that while I was outraged that people could care so much about something as trivial as the design of her dress, I too care more than I would like to admit about what other people think of my appearance. This, along with observation made on how Sarah’s husband, who also appeared on the red carpet, was not asked once what brand he was wearing and where he got it from, brought our understanding of the way society focuses on women when it comes to personal appearance to our focused attention.
While an article like this might seem trivial to some, especially when compared to more ‘hard hitting’ news circulating the media that week, such as the two hundred girls kidnapped by terrorists in Nigeria, for the company this article underlined a number of the running themes found in our performance. It also contradicts nicely with some of our sillier, more playful scenes.
This use of newspapers, magazines and the media as a stimulus for a scene is a technique that the company could continue to use in the future. This documentary style theatre has also been used in the past by companies such as the Living Newspaper and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop. Theatre Workshop, who took inspiration from many other companies and practitioners created performances such as Oh! What a Lovely War by scripting some of the recorded words of the various people involved in Wolrd War 1, and presented them in an end of the pier show setting. This up-beat, satyrical action was then contrasted with factual information such as death tolls presented to the audience on news reels, screens and boards. For Littlewood,
“the success of a piece is ‘all a question of juxtaposition'”
(Holdsworth, 2006, 82) as the nature of this contradiction effectively underlined the seriousness of the topic, and made the audience think. This notion of the contradiction between the two or three things happening on stage is a kin to our Sarah Millican scene where her emotive words are infiltrated with catchy television advert slogans for female ‘self improvement’ products, underlining the ridiculouness of a culture that centres around women seeking to improve their image purely for the approval of others.
The use of current affairs within a piece can often bring the topic being discussed to the audience on a more realistic level. For example, in our scene that discusses the price of fame we contrast an acoustic version of the poem I’ve got a Golden Ticket, as found in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and adapted by our very own Libby Soper, with a video montage of a number of female celebrities, all of whom have died from drugs and alcohol. This montage finishes with a clip of journalist, television presenter and celebrity daughter Peaches Geldof, who, like her mother, died of a drug overdose in the 7th April 2014, leaving two young children behind. The moving image of happy looking Peaches along with the audiences knowledge of her recent and tragic death brings the message of the scene into the modern day context, providing the audience the time to reflect not only on the price of fame, but also on the other themes discussed in our previous scenes.
It has been said that “no play, like no newspaper article, is without bias and infliction” (Hammond and Steward, 2008, 10), and indeed this is one of our scenes that very obviously presents the bias that comes from eight image and media conscious women. While in some scenes we have offered the opportunity for the audience to draw their own conclusions and opinions from our re-contextualisation of the original text, in this scene it is very clear that we empathise with the topic discussed in the article. Having embraced a more feminist approach to the presentation of the already ‘feminine’ topics we had previously chosen to explore we have created a complex and thought provoking piece that speaks very much to the audience of today. In looking to the future I would suggest that where we see a theme or natural path appearing in our devising process it would be wise to follow it.
Works Cited
Dahl, Roald. (2010) Poetry By Roald Dahl “I’ve Got a Golden Ticket”. [online] Available from: http://roalddahlpoetry.weebly.com/poetry.html[Accessed 25 May 2014].
Hammond, W. And Steward, D. (2008) Verbatim Verbatim. London: Oberon Books.
Holdsworth, N. (2006) Joan Littlewood. London: Routldge.
Littlewood, J. (1963) Oh! What a Lovely War. London: Methuen.
Millican, S. (2014) Dont Judge Me On My Dress. Radio Times, 15th May 2014.