My Key Findings

Navigating collaborative working- What does it mean to write ‘together’?

Our company name became ‘Scratch That’ because we scratched the first idea we had. Having a relaxed and non-precious outlook on our ideas was important during this project, we had to be ready to let go of our ideas in favour of the ideas of the collaborator, as well as being prepared to cut sections or concepts because they no longer worked.

Having never written with another person, this was an entirely new experience.

After starting work on ‘Airtime’ we worked mainly individually and came together in studio to discuss what we had written. Due to availability outside of university, we found that I had more time to write and was also a faster writer, so we needed to find a way to ensure that Maravillia had a substantial amount of work in the script.

After attempting to write a scene together, we found that dividing the boardgame questions/scenes between us would be more effective. Writing together was hard for me as I tend to write with a flow as opposed to a considered craft. Additionally, we naturally had stronger voices in certain questions/areas of the narrative, so this was an easy way of working.

Having completed two drafts of the script we now had a lot of content to work with, and so we began to break it down into its most effective parts.

I wrote down the headings of each scene/key moment in the script and put those little pieces of paper on a board so we could arrange and remove as we saw fit- all while seeing the overview of the story.

We had a read through the text and identified our favourite scenes, and removed what we felt wasn’t adding anything to the characters or story. We also reshuffled some of the questions to earlier or later parts of the script, so the tone and information was revealed at a more pleasing pace- as opposed to being too heavy in one area.

It was at times difficult to navigate the questions and the tone of the piece because some questions had to be asked by certain characters for the following dialogue to make sense, but in some cases that meant the order of back-and-forth gameplay was incorrect. So, it was interesting to decide what solution to use in what cases- sometimes we added a small question in between to set them on the right path, or we simply had the characters disregard the gameplay rules. 

We found that for the most part, the script became a 50/50 split between our writing. I took on a more light-hearted and relaxed approach to dialogue and small questions, while Maravillia authored most of the ‘meatier’ questions towards the end of the script. I think this is a fun way to structure the script because it gives the piece personality, seeing a tonal shift through our writing styles is enjoyable as a performer and writer.

If we were to develop our script further (which I think it has lots of potential for) I would like to spend more time talking generally about the history and circumstances of the environment as well as our characters. I think now we have a more solid view of our characters than the world they’re in. Which is, for this context, I think the right thing to have prioritized; however there are small discrepancies and lines in the script which don’t entirely fit with my view of the setting, or simply don’t make complete sense.

Designing a future

Unlike with other projects I have made, I did not have a strong visual image of the set from the beginning of writing. Instead, the set grew around the characters and their activities during the story.

The base concept for the piece was two friends playing a boardgame at the end of the world- I had been imagining a lot of rubble when picturing the landscape, the story takes place in- however I wanted more character and interaction to happen onstage, not just from the people. I was very keen to present a landscape that you could peel back the layers of to see the different stages of this collapse of society and overall world ending period.

The script only exists in the one location, the characters don’t move very far, meaning I couldn’t present this passage of time through a journey across the landscape. They arrive at a specific destination and stay there- so why? We decided to build around these characters a kind of den or hide-out, where they had been collecting objects and essentially creating an archive of what was once ‘important’.

We knew that in general we wanted the piece to feel British as opposed to ambiguous or American (which can sometimes be the case since we both consume a fair bit of American media) so we eventually settled on a garden shed as this ‘den’ type place for our characters to hang out.

Deciding what to put in our shed became a challenge. Our objects needed to look old and as if they had lived a hard life, but that’s not something you can find on the store shelf, and to artificially age enough objects- as well as all our other responsibilities- felt like too large of an undertaking.

So, we aimed to use found objects in our set. Another group in our class had discarded a bunch of objects they had found and no longer needed for their set, so we adopted those. Overall, I liked the fullness they brought to the space; the eclectic selection made the characters feel interesting. But we found that there wasn’t enough connection between the script and the set. We needed more objects that the characters interacted with.

Books, rocks, the boardgame, and the idea of repairing technology were the references to objects that we had written in the script. During our first day in the theatre, we constructed our wooden shed frame for the first time and put only the scripted objects into the space. From this it was decided that we would only work with things the characters interact with.

This worked better with the shed frame because it might’ve looked strange to have a sparse and abstract exterior frame, and a detailed and naturalistic interior.

Less is more became the approach to set/props.

In some ways our set is simply the wooden frame, and everything else is a prop.

The relationship and interplay between these two roles of the mise en scene is something I’d like to explore again. I often enjoy seeing transformative and climbable set structures in plays, so the idea of a set that functions as a prop is interesting.