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School
& Youth Theatre
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The Big River Project 2And come back he did, with the first few pages of script. Our tramp is an alcoholic and is tormented by two "giant five foot bloody rats", which he keeps happy with food, either bought (cheese and onion pasties from Greggs are their favourites) or taken from litter bins. This situation is not surprising, given the copious amounts of vodka he consumes. It was very funny and held plenty of promise for the future. We read it, swapped parts around, improvised what happened next, and Neil promised as full a script as possible for the next session, the fifth. Again he came up with the goods and we all liked what he'd done. It did become obvious that some re-writes were needed, but I've never heard of a new play which didn't when moved from the page to the actors' mouths! He returned to the sixth and final session with re-writes completed and copies for everyone, so I decided we should cast it there and then. The kids had a pretty good idea of their own capabilities and expressed interest in specific parts: we were able to satisfy them all - although not everyone got the part they initially wanted. Basically what happens is we see the relationship between the rats and the tramp at the beginning. They send him off to get them a pasty, with lots of threats about what will happen if he fails. He goes begging and tries his luck with two old women, two real tarts and a businessman. He has some luck - a few coppers from the tarts - but a busker relieves him of these and he is desperate because the shops are about to shut. He stops a passing vicar who gives him £2. This is too much! Enough pasties to keep the rats at bay for a week or a vodka in the pub? He can't decide. So he decides to flip the coin - he drops it and it rolls down a drain. He is accosted by Montague Firebrand, a ratcatcher, who turns out to be a figure from his own past. Gradually the reason for his situation emerges and he is left, at the end, (hopefully) on the way to rehabilitation. Whilst Neil was working on his final script, I was doing some thinking. basically there are two worlds in the play: the interior world of the tramp and the external (real) world. I wanted to make these worlds very distinct, and I also wanted the "real" world to be a scary place for him, so I decided to put the "real" characters in Commedia dell'Arte style masks while the "dream" characters should be unmasked, except, of course, for the rats, which had to be as scary as the real world. The dream characters were Montague Firebrand and a couple of waiters from a local Italian restaurant (Don't ask!). At one point Montague tells him, "I am dead, mate. I just can't work out whether I'm a ghost or a booze-fuelled hallucination you're concocting out of your past." When I read that, I was even more certain that I was on the right track as far as the concept of thep roduction was concerned. As this scary real world surrounds him all the time, I decided, too, to have the masked characters onstage from the start in a semi-circle around him, frozen in typical poses. At critical points in the scene they would change their poses. When he begs from them, instead of him going to them, as the script suggested, I decided they would all move at once and each group, in turn, would appear beside him. When he flips the coin, they would all gather round and watch as it rolled down the drain. They would then depart from the stage, howling with mocking laughter, to return at the end when the "reconciliation" begins. Next came the sharing! Boy, were they scared by that! >> Next
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