The British Theatre Guide: The Big River Project

School & Youth Theatre

The Big River Project

We've been very lucky to have been asked to take part in a number of theatre/drama projects over the years. The last to happen during my career was the Big River Project, in 2003. Organised by the Tyneside Enterprise Development Company (TEDCO), with funding from the Part of Tyne Authority, the project was a celebration of the River Tyne and involved four schools from each of the four Tyneside boroughs: Gateshead (Heworth Grange School), Newcastle (St Mary's School), North Tyneside (Marden High) and South Tyneside (my school, King George V).

A writer was put into each school for six sessions: for the other three schools, the writers were poets or novelists, for us at KGV it was a playwright (also an actor and director), Neil Armstrong. The idea was to develop writing by the students and the subject was to be the River Tyne. When the writers were finished their work, then a second artist from a different discipline would work with the students for four sessions. We chose to have a videographer as our second artist: James de Marco, an American filmmaker resident in Gateshead.

I already knew Neil through my connections with the Customs House in South Shields, our local theatre where I am a member of the Board of Trustees. A number of the kids knew him, too. He'd appeared in the panto for a few years (most recently as the baddy's sidekick, delighting in the name of Vomit!) and in a number of plays. He'd also had one of his own plays produced there (The Dark Side of the Half Moon). In addition, they'd seen him in the kids' soap Byker Grove and in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet!

Neil is a very relaxed and friendly guy, which helped enormously, for the kids were at their ease with him immediately. There were twelve kids involved (the number set by TEDCO): most were Year 10 (15 years old), but there were two Year 8s and a Year 9.

We tossed around loads of ideas about what the play could be about in the first session. Something historical was the obvious starting point and none of us liked the idea! It would be just too boring, the kids thought - and, to be honest, having "done" the history of South Tyneside for the Millennium Dome show, I had to agree.

In any case, we had a pretty sherewd suspicion that the idea was so obvious that the other schools would think of it, too! The second alternative was a fairly sentimental approach - the "good old homeland" approach, and none of us liked that any better than the first.

To cut a long story short, after a couple of sessions, we finally hit upon a central character, a tramp. He was to be based on a real figure. Near to the Customs House (which is on the riverside), a rather odd individual takes his stand every day and waves at every passing ship. Why? we wondered, and spent a full session just chucking around possible ideas.

We came up with all kinds of weird and wonderful ideas. Perhaps he was a former master mariner? Perhaps his wife had left him and sailed away across to Norway or Holland? Perhaps... perhaps... perhaps...

We got well and truly stuck: even if we could supply a good reason, we would still have to turn it into an interesting play - and something that would fit in well with the project theme. We explored the idea of a quest of some sort, which would take him the length of the river. That, we felt, would be really rambling, and so looked for other ideas.

And looked and looked! Eventually, working on the priciple that if you throw something totally unexpected into the mix, it might open the creative floodgates, I got out a couple of rat masks our professional company, KG Productions, had had made for a Theatre in Education piece and simply said, "Can we use these?"

After everyone had tried them on and hissed at each other a bit (!), we started thinking and came up with the idea of him being an alcoholic who is tormented by visions of man-sized talking rats. How that would fit in with the waving at ships and the Big River we weren't at all sure, but what the hell? We liked the idea!

By this time we were at the end of the third of six sessions, and we'd talked and improvised and had come up with two - we thought - good ideas, so Neil said he'd go home and come back the following week with at least a scenario and a proposed opening scene, and there it rested.

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