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Interviews
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Clean Break's Charged Project at Latitude 2011 Corinne Salisbury talks to Sam Holcroft, author of Dancing Bears. Last year renowned female-only theatre company Clean Break invited six woman playwrights to produce short pieces around the theme of women in the criminal justice system. The resulting play cycle, Charged, has since had two runs at Soho Theatre. The plays were scattered through every nook of the building, from the basement to the bar to the main house. Now two of the pieces, Sam Holcroft's Dancing Bears and Chloe Moss's Fatal Light, are to be remounted in the Theatre Tent at Latitude. I spoke to Holcroft about her piece, which looks at the culture and psychology of all-girl gangs. "I knew that it was important to Clean Break to address the subject of youth crime and specifically gangs", says Holcroft, "and it really struck a chord with me, so I asked if I could be the one to write about that". What research went into the play? I asked. "Clean Break arranged for me to attend NACRO youth justice conference, where I talked to police and social workers, and spoke to psychologists about youth gang mentality, what is it about a gang that is attractive to young people and what it provides for them that perhaps their family doesn't… And Clean Break also put me in touch with a couple of women who had had experiences of gang life or were associated with it in some way. None of their stories appear in the play, but their stories inspire circumstances in which the characters in the play find themselves." I asked if Dancing Bears is looking to change people's perceptions on girl gangs in any specific way. Holcroft explains that while she set out to write about the female experience of gang life, "it became impossible to tell that story without telling the story of the boys as well because often boys will recruit girls into their gangs… and in the hierarchy of the gangs girls are quite low down; they tend to be subject to a lot of violence and a lot of ritualistic behaviour, and they're given the low-ranking jobs and made to do some of the dirty work, carrying guns, carrying drugs, because the police are less likely to be suspicious of a girl, or that's what they think." So Holcroft wanted to show first of all how girls sometimes rebel against this treatment in mixed-sex gangs and form all-female gangs of their own. But also, she describes, "the hierarchy within a mixed sex gang is unintentionally created within a single sex gang as well. The girls start exacting some of the same violence and the same behaviour which they experience in a mixed sex gang on girls lower down the hierarchy in their single sex gang. And so this sort of mirroring happens, where the behaviour in a mixed sex gang and in a single sex gang sort of echoes each other." In order to convey the stories of the boys as well, Holcroft decided to have four actresses who would switch between playing the boys and the girls in her story. "It's a very fast-paced play", she says, "it's full of action, and it's supposed to be kids with so much energy that they're bouncing off the walls, tearing around the stage, pulling each other's hair out…" She hopes the staging will work well in a festival environment - "hopefully if you've got lots of external noise and lots of distractions like you have at a festival, the actors have the opportunity to hold your focus because the play is very energetic and will catch your attention". Finally we talk about Holcroft's previous outing at Latitude: she had a short play, Vogue, performed there in 2006. Does she have any thoughts about how the theatre side of the festival has changed in the intervening years? "I think the theatre programme has come on leaps and bounds since then: it's a big part of the festival now, whereas before I think it was just a sort of fledging idea. There was a small repertoire of plays on, and I think it's much bigger now." Holcroft describes how the Charged plays, when performed at Soho, created a sort of festival feel, as they took over every part of the building; "so the actresses are well used to performing in unusual circumstances and to an audience who are coming and going". I have a feeling that she needn't worry about the going part.
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