Our company name derived from our aims in terms of target audience. We wanted to play to an age that we knew the most about, this would make it easier for us in terms of devising. The immediate direction was to go with those aged between eighteen and twenty one as this is primarily the age for students attending University. However, we felt that limiting ourselves to adults only left little room for creativity. Upon reflection, we decided to go with those aged between sixteen and twenty one. This gave us a wider bracket to work within and opened up doors to different themes.
Along with this age range, we needed a company name that reflected our choices. Being a company based within Lincoln, we vocally discussed all the ideas that typically relate to Lincoln. One common theme was that of the train barriers, as these seem to cause many citizens complications. We took this idea of the train line and quickly linked that with the idea of the railcard. Students aged sixteen to twenty one are usually issued with a student railcard, and as this tied in with our location and target audience, our company name was born.
Deciding upon the concept for our show proved a difficult task as we all had very different ideas on the direction in which our performance should go. One way to solve this problem was to see what our target audience wanted from us. We each conducted a short survey and gathered answers from people within our target audience. A common theme was comedy, naturally this was the direction in which our group chose to go. As individual members we had already expressed our interest in comedy and light-hearted themes in comparison to dark themes, so this was a clear direction for us. Another theme that became apparent from our survey was that our audience wanted to be presented with relatable issues. One common theme that most sixteen to twenty one year olds have is that of education. Mostly the fear of moving on from education or leaving education.
Upon conducting further research we discovered that a good majority of graduates aim to go on to teaching. It seemed natural to take this step forward and work with a comedy script about teaching, combining our survey answers together.
We wanted our story to focus around a main character that would be our primary post graduate teacher. After brainstorming some ideas about where this storyline could take us, we developed characters and a basic plot structure which we then improvised scenes around. After a couple of improvisation sessions, it became clear that this was not aiding our creative process. We scrapped these sessions in aid of writing a full script and coming back to the rehearsal process with a scripted piece.
Within this comedic script, we also needed an element of drama to contrast with the themes. We chose to look closely at a forbidden relationship between the Headmaster and another teacher, although this provides an element of seriousness within our piece, it also helped to add further comedic lines when the other teachers discuss this relationship. This only furthered our comedic exploration.
One comedic scene within our piece is when our protagonist character has to lead a parents evening. We asked teachers we knew for any horror stories about parents evening that they could share with us. To our surprise, there were loads, the primary theme being that of argumentative parents. This gave inspiration of a comedic scene between our main teacher and a set of parents. These teachers that we spoke to also gave us some tips on how to deal with argumentative parents, which we later turned into comedic lines within our piece.
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