Railcard Theatre believes that theatre can be important in the development of today’s youth.
In an era of an ever changing, consistently growing presence of digital media, at Railcard Theatre we believe that these can be combined to create a beautiful hybrid of performance.
A performance that utilises the audience’s fascination with social media. We aim to combine modern media with naturalistic theatre in order to reach our audience.
The combination of the two styles builds a platform that makes theatre appealing to those who might not typically attend.
Railcard Theatre aims to portray relatable issues to today’s youth in a way that is both new and familiar.
We incorporate familiar digital social platforms into original writing to construct a narrative that is both interesting and forward thinking.
Our aim is to bring more young people into the fold of Theatre with a vision to inspire them to contribute to the future of the ancient industry.
Young people are the future, they are the key to ours and Theatre’s life expectancy.
Railcard Theatre believes theatre can move people to breed change, inform people of political stances and shape a generation as much as the film and television industry.
We aim to make theatre accessible regardless of social class or background. We use social media as a key feature of our performances due to everyone’s exposure to it in the 21st Century.
We believe that in order for theatre to shape a generation, it must evolve, to adapt to today’s audiences whilst maintaining the conventions that has shaped it for generations.
As we begin the module that will lead us to our last performance of university, I have been asked to fulfill the roles of Co-Producer and Assistant Director in order to assist both the Producer and Director with the many tasks and responsibilities they have. The role of Co-Producer is something entirely new to me and it will no doubt take some getting used to – I personally prefer to be on the stage rather than part of the production team but I feel like this may be something that I could potentially excel at; only time will tell I expect.
Assistant Director is, on the other hand, a position I am much more familiar with. I have never myself been an AD but I am aware of the general roles and duties they must perform in order to aid the Director. I predict that the importance of my role as AD will increase as we come closer to the end of the process and have a script to work from. The roles of Railcard Theatre are as follows:
Zach Begg – Co-Producer/Director/Head Writer/Performer
Rebecca Bierton – Health and Safety Officer/Performer
Emily Cooksey – Stage Manager/Writer
Chloe Harrison – Assistant Director/Assistant Stage Manager/Editor
Chris O’Donoghue – Lighting Designer/Writer/Performer
Chris Petit – Marketing Director/Writer/Performer
Emma Rewse – Costume Designer/Performer
Lauren Towell – Set Designer/Writer/Performer
Charlie Watts – Co-Producer/Sound Designer/Performer
Laura Welberry – Hair and Make-Up Artist/Performer
After a long and painstaking process, we finally landed on an idea that we are all excited for. The general premise is to follow a university graduate (John Smith) through his transition into teacher training. I feel this has great potential as it could be relatable to our entire target audience (16-25 year olds) due to the range of characters we can represent within the piece. In the creation of this idea our most important focus is making the piece accessible to the lower range of our target audience without giving them the wrong impression of what’s to come. Setting our piece in a school allows us to use characters of their age in order to make the piece relatable to them.
What comes next is the writing of the script, and luckily Railcard Theatre contains several people who recently wrote a script for another module in our course: Emily Cooksey, Chris Petit, Chris O’Donoghue, Lauren Towell and myself. Naturally, these are the people that have formed the writing team with the addition of Chloe Harrison as script editor due to her authority as Director and input from my fellow Co-Producer, Charlie Watts. The first draft of the script should hopefully be finished in a short amount of time, I have allocated people to write scenes in preparation for a writer’s meeting on Wednesday 9th March (2016) in order to ensure that the scenes piece together seamlessly. The writing allocations are as follows:
Scene One – Chris O’Donoghue
Scene Two – Lauren Towell
Scene Three – Chris O’Donoghue
Scene Four – Zach Begg
Scene Five – Lauren Towell
Scene Six – Chris Petit
Scene Seven – Emily Cooksey
Scene Eight – Zach Begg and Emily Cooksey
Scene Nine – Chris Petit
As a co-producer, one of my most important responsibilities is to source funding for our play. However before I can do this, I needed to figure out how much funding we would actually require in order to produce the show. Therefore Charlie and I drew up both an actual budget and a real life budget, pictured below.
Real Life
Actual
Since we began to put the script onstage the process has, for the most part, ran smoothly. However, due to issues raised by herself and other members of the company which I shall not divulge, the production team (Charlie Watts, Chloe Harrison, Emily Cooksey and Myself) decided that the best possible response in the name of the future of Railcard Theatre would be for me to take over as the Director of the show and for Chloe to take my original role as Assistant Director as well as undertake an additional role of Assistant Stage Manager.
I have never directed anything on this scale and the prospect of doing so excites me. It feels very natural that I should direct due to my large involvement in the conception of our original idea and the writing of the script. Directing is actually rather new to me, the last and only time I was director was for British Theatre since 1956 in Year 2 of University and, in the interest of remaining candid, I will be the first to admit that it was not exactly best piece of direction. I however intend to learn from my mistakes there and take this role more seriously than I did in the past, hopefully this will put me on track to creating something worthy of being the last show of the Class of 2013/2014.
When it was decided that the main character of our play would be Chris Petit despite his title as Marketing Director – an understandably large role in the production of our show. Because of this we decided that it would be best for Charlie and myself, alongside Chris, to form a marketing team in order to not overload Chris with work so early on in the process. We began to formulate strategies to market the play and after I drafted the initial budgets (both real-life and actual) we decided that we could use both posters and fliers in order to advertise the show. We also decided that we should maintain a strong social media presence as we intend to reference Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook and Tumblr within our show.
We brainstormed ideas for poster and flier design and decided that the general design of the two items need to be similar, therefore making the decision to use the same photograph of the main character on both, but change the orientation of it between fliers and posters (Flier: Landscape, Poster: Portrait). The composition of the image consisted of the back of Chris Petit’s head, staring up at a blackboard/whiteboard. I felt that this image, whilst simple, is incredibly effective at connoting our intentions for the play. The use of a whiteboard/blackboard clearly symbolises the setting of our play and Chris’ positioning within the poster is also incredibly illustrative of his character going into the play. The fact that you can see his back suggests that he is moving forward with his life, also creating comradery with the potential audience member as they are both looking at the same thing: A blackboard/whiteboard with the title of the Play (Ungraded) at the top. Another interesting point to note about Chris’s positioning in this is that he is looking up at the board, suggesting that something to do with school is daunting for him.
Thanks to Iona Carter, a Media student at the University of Lincoln, the composition of these marketing materials was a simple process. Without her photography, the posters and fliers would be of a much lower quality than the final versions of the posters and fliers, shown below.
Flier
Poster
Nah.
And so, just like that it’s over. After what has been possibly the most exciting, rewarding and stressful 4 months of my life, Ungraded has had it’s opening (and closing) night and it appeared to go down well with our audience, there were laughs in the right place (and some wrong places) and reflective silence in the correct places. It truly feels like I watched my baby on stage and I am so proud of all of my Cast and Crew, they have made this experience enjoyable overall and the show tonight went so smoothly.
I felt like I did the best that I could in my all of my roles. I did make mistakes, ones that I will readily admit to, but I also did a lot of things right. In terms of my direction, I would have loved to be able to spend more time on the play, as even on the show there were still moments that I know I could have gotten more out of, but overall I feel that we at Railcard Theatre achieved our goals, outlined in our mission statement:
Railcard theatre is a new theatre company that specialise in creating entertaining, escapist theatre that tackles relatable and inspiring issues through performance. Our aim is to challenge the stigma around theatre by making it an accessible experience for young people to learn within and enjoy. We are looking to use real-life stories and experiences as a basis to write our own original content that will aim to help unite and inspire young people. We believe that theatre has the power to provide a creative outlet for young people who need guidance, unity and above all entertainment. Relatable stories are at the heart of our practice and we hope to inspire and entertain you with our performance.
Throughout this module I have learnt several things, the most important thing probably being not to undertake too many roles. But in all seriousness, I have learnt that working in theatre, whether it be as a performer, director, producer or stage manager (3/4 ain’t bad), all of the stress of creating a performance from scratch is a means to an end. Whether you hate everybody you are working with or if you love everybody you work with, in the end nothing tastes sweeter than the applause from an audience that genuinely enjoyed your performance.
Out of all the roles I took in this process, the hardest one by far has been Director. In this role I have experienced great stresses and moments of sheer joy. But the hardest part of this role is letting go. On show day, I complained endlessly about wanting to be sat in the audience like the other directors on the module, but I see now that this would have been a much more daunting experience. Being backstage while it happened made me feel more involved in the whole performance and I can imagine that, had I been sat in the audience, I would have felt detached and helpless should anything major had gone wrong. Thankfully, nothing major went wrong, lines were fluffed, set was in the wrong place backstage and props were misplaced mid show but it wasn’t noticeable, at least I didn’t notice.
From your Co-Producer, Director, Head Writer and the infamously short fused Mr. Hamilton,
Good night!
Word Count: 2013
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