Читать книгу Chequered Flags to Chequered Futures - Mark Wheeller - Страница 6

Introduction

I was certain Driven to Distraction (2009), my would also be my final one road safety play. Arguably it was, as this is no message laden “road safety” play at all. It uses an avoidable Road Traffic Accident (RTA) as the tragic centrepiece to true story of three young lives suddenly torpedoed into a different trajectory.

The huge impact Too Much Punch For Judy had, led to my being commissioned to write all of the others. Driven to Distraction was no exception but was commissioned for a professional cast, unlike the others which were, initially, written for school age students.

I wanted to write a more naturalistic play and came up with an interesting structure counterpointing two time frames and two accounts of different parts of one story. Both parts collide at the end in the accident scene. The structure of Driven to Distraction inspired the one I use in Chequered Flags a few years on, where Chris’s back story is longer and therefore faster but, once in hospital they catch up with each other.

I remember thinking…

“I will never write another play with a road accident in it!”

(Just for the record… there was another one after this, as one of the characters referred to a horrific accident in my David Bowie tribute play Can You Hear Me Major Tom?)

A few years after I made that private pledge, I heard that an ex student/OYT member Chris Gilfoy (with whom I’d remained vaguely in touch), had been seriously injured in a tragic, real life car accident. Chris returned to OYT as part of his recovery. We came to know one another again and more than once, the idea of using his story as the basis for a play crossed my mind. I dismissed it and certainly didn’t tell Chris my private thoughts (he will only discover them as he reads this!). I was concerned it might appear like I had some sort of weird obsession!

One day, I heard some students raving about a powerful talk they’d heard in a PSHE lesson from… yes you’ve guessed… Chris Gilfoy. They were saying what a powerful impact his story had made on them and, at that point, the weird obsession (I do clearly have) surfaced and I approached Chris. He told me the full story. It had inherent drama and was very different from all the other RTA “message” plays I’d written before.

I had begun to question the validity of propaganda plays since “Judy”, the subject of Too Much Punch for Judy, had gone on to drink/drive (and kill another driver as a result) again. This situation raised the question:

If the person who perpetrated the offence doesn’t learn from it how can I expect an audience watching the play do so?

I would write Chris’s story without any pressure to adhere to pre-defined road safety messages. I would write it as the human tragedy it had been for all of those involved.

Chris had been involved as a twelve-year-old in developing Chicken! (giving his name to the lead character and his mum’s (Ann) to his character’s mum), so he was well aware of my back catalogue but was still surprised when I approached him:

When Mark first approached me about the possibility of our story being written as a play I was shocked. I didn’t think it would be of interest to anyone else, but I knew that if it was going to happen then Mark would do a good job of it!

After securing Chris’s consent I made contact with Shelley, the driver and Jane, Shelley’s mum, and was relieved to learn they were also willing for me to develop a verbatim play.

I conducted interviews with Jane and Shelley, Chris, his wife Lucy, his mum (Ann) and Dad (Roy). Then the problems began. I found it so hard to make time to transcribe the interviews. I had hours of tapes but the prospect seemed like a never-ending job. I delayed. More than a year passed and I had made no real progress. There was always another project for me to complete.

Then something utterly incredible happened. A fairy godmother landed. A fairy godmother from the other side of the world!

I went to Hong Kong to conduct a series of workshops in a school where my plays are studied. (Unbeknown to me, it seems my plays are used a lot in International School Drama Departments.) During the visit I was invited to a meal with two drama teachers from the Victoria Shanghai Academy. By the end of the meal they had invited their Principal, Richard Parker, to the meal and he asked me to think of a play I had always wanted to write… adding that their Academy would commission me to write it! I suggested Chris’s story and said what an impact premiering this story would have on everyone… especially if Chris was able to attend the premiere!

From that point on everything moved unbelievably fast. I remember arriving home and transcribing the tapes well before any agreements had been finalised. Arrangements were made for the visit with four members of my Oasis Youth Theatre (performing a hastily rehearsed Chicken! as a partner play) securing an invitation too! What an opportunity! When I first told the Principal (at Oasis) and the young people in the cast, I don’t think any of them believed it would happen. Their parents didn’t either!

I completed an interview with Graham (the other passenger in the car) who I had made no effort to contact up until this point. I also interviewed Bryoni (who was in my Year 10 Drama Class), Chris and Lucy’s daughter.

Around this time, verbatim theatre was gaining a credibility I never felt it had previously. I felt (perhaps wrongly) that it was regarded as second class. This genre wasn’t viewed as “proper theatre” and so, I couldn’t be considered a “proper writer” until I had created a successful naturalistic play… hence my determination to write one. Suddenly, I was being regarded as one of the elder statesmen of this “newly accepted’ form. This was all magnificent for my confidence in writing this play, which uses the original words and virtually nothing “invented”.

A few months later, I sent the first draft to VSA. They didn’t ask for any changes. Everyone was delighted with the result. The title was developed through a Facebook thread in which all sorts of titles were suggested and discussed.

Chequered Flags to Chequered Futures was born.

The premiere was planned for October 2014. I was not involved in the development of the VSA performance, but had a strong impression that I had handed my play to a very confident drama department and put my trust in their professionalism. When we arrived in Hong Kong they were at dress rehearsal stage. Chris (who, with his family, was invited too) recalls watching that rehearsal:

When the time came to finally watch it being rehearsed and then performed in Hong Kong I was very nervous, and in fact when I saw it I was an emotional wreck!

I was sat next to Chris who was sobbing towards the end… and this was only the dress rehearsal! I remember putting my arm around him and he said:

It’s all good. If I’m crying… it means it’s good!

His presence lifted the performance of the cast beyond anything their teachers had expected.

The performances were incredibly powerful. A cast, all of whom had English as a second or third language, were speaking these colloquial words with obvious understanding and moving the audience to tears. It will live in my memory forever. Chris and his family participated in a Q&A, all of which is captured on film and that added such an invaluable dimension to this unique production.

Watching the play, there were only two minor amendments I chose to make. On occasions, I have to do so much re-writing but this seemed to have been “right” from the outset.

Although a commission, it was still a labour of love. It is one of only two plays where I knew the subject before I started the research, the other being Sweet FA/No Place for a Girl.

It also benefitted substantially from my developed understanding of structure which arrived in my head care of a John Burgess playwrighting course at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton. He also delivered some classes on verbatim, which was the beginning of my accepting it as “officially sanctioned”!

The newfound confidence I have in the verbatim form shines through in this play. I had the confidence to use Jane’s powerful monologues, as in her original interviews with me, without trying to break the speeches down into shorter lines spoken by different characters, which I may well have done previously to make it more like a play.

In the Hong Kong performance, we (in the audience) were able to prepare ourselves mentally, as Jane approached centre stage, for what we, (the audience) knew would be another harrowing account. It offered an effective change of pace to the lively ensemble approach that typified the way I dramatised Chris’s story. (In the VSA production the ensemble were also used behind Jane to offer visual images to great effect.)

Now the play is published and will, we hope, develop a life of its own. I can’t wait to see how it is used and whether, as I predict, it will eventually replace Too Much Punch for Judy as the favoured Mark Wheeller Road play featuring an avoidable RTA. I hope it will.

The thought of other schools performing our story is a bit surreal but I hope that a lesson can be learnt from the whole experience.

Mark Wheeller (with Chris Gilfoy)