TEACHER RESOURCE PACKFOR TEACHERS WORKING WITH PUPILS IN YEAR 4 AND UP

BEGINNERS

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BEGINNERSWritten and directed by Tim Crouch

FROM 20 - 29 MARCH 2018FOR PUPILS IN SCHOOL YEARS 4 AND UP

LET’S DISCUSS THIS LIKE ADULTS.

Beginners plural noun

1. a person who has just started to do or learn something.

2. a call given to prepare to start a play.

Beginners tells the story of three families trapped in a waterlogged holiday cottage

over summer. The children are bored. The adults are down the pub. So far so normal.

Renowned award-winning writer and director Tim Crouch (National Theatre,

Royal Court, Unicorn) presents this joyous and imaginative new play for children

everywhere. Beginners is an exquisite, funny and moving story that reminds us that

the adult we’ll become – and the child we were – is always with us.

An extraordinary show for everyone who has ever wanted to be understood.

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CONTENTSINTRODUCTION TO THE PACK p.4

ABOUT THE PLAY p.5

MAKING THE PLAY: INTERVIEW WITH WRITER AND DIRECTOR, TIM CROUCH p.7

DRAMA ACTIVITIES - OVERVIEW p.9

We are currently developing the full sequence of classroom activities with our partner school. They will be added to this pack by January 2018.

TEACHER RESOURCES

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INTRODUCTIONThis pack is for teachers bringing pupils to see Beginners in Spring 2018. A series of drama activities will be added to this pack by January 2018.

The Unicorn production of Beginners is a funny, imaginative and surprising new play about children’s innate creativity, resilience and resourcefulness.

The classroom activities are designed to support and extend pupils’ visit to the theatre and offer teachers ways to pick up on and explore the themes in the play, before and after a visit. They will use drama and storytelling as ways of exploring ideas that are relevant to the play and to support National Curriculum requirements:

‘All pupils should be enabled to participate in and gain knowledge, skills and understanding associated with the artistic practice of drama. Pupils should be able to adopt, createand sustain a range of roles, responding appropriately to others in role. They shouldhave opportunities to improvise, devise and script drama for one another and a range of audiences, as well as to rehearse, refine, share and respond thoughtfully to drama and theatre performances.’ National Curriculum

The resources will also provide National Curriculum links at Key Stage Two: to English through the development of spoken word and writing tasks, and to SMCS aspects of learning.

There will be a free teacher CPD day for Beginners on Thu 8 Feb 2018 from 10am – 4pm where teachers can find out more about the show and gain practical experience of the classroom activities, before leading them with a class.

To find out more about the CPD or to book your place, email schools@unicorntheatre.com.

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ABOUT THE PLAY Beginners is set in a rental cottage in Cornwall where three families holiday together each year. While the adults amuse themselves in the kitchen, or down the pub, their four children are left to their own devices. The children have not chosen to spend time with each other, and, as the rainy week goes on, they find ways to be together and to express the difficulties and challenges they face in their daily lives.

Beginners takes a look at what happens when adults are preoccupied by their own lives and children are left to fend for themselves. It is about what isn’t said to children and about how children find ways to process their experiences without the help of the adults in their lives. It’s also about play and theatre and creativity as powerful means for processing and expressing our experience of the world.

Lucy is the daughter of Jen and Paul; she imagines she’s a ballet dancer and that she has a baby called Jasmine.

Nigel is the son of Fran and Steve, who have split up since the last holiday. Nigel dresses as a doctor. This year Nigel’s dad, Steve, has come away with his new girlfriend, Lisbeth. Nigel’s sister Sian has chosen not to come on holiday this year but to stay at home with their mum, Fran.

Bart is the son of Lisbeth (they are Dutch). This is the first time he has been on the Cornwall holiday. Bart is aware he has taken Sian’s place on the holiday and that his mum has taken Nigel’s mum’s place. Bart’s father died of cancer.

Joy is the daughter of Maddie. Maddie is a single parent and has cancer. Joy is withdrawn and sometimes angry with the other children.

Sandy, the dog, likes to keep close to Joy.

The structure of Beginners is unusual. When we first meet Lucy, Nigel, Joy and Bart, it isn’t clear at first who these four characters are. To start with, we think these characters are adults, and then we come to understand that the adults are actually playing children.

There are also four child actors in the play, who later play the four children too. At times, a child actor will enter the stage and shadow their adult actor. For example, at one point when Nigel is ill in bed, the child actor, who also plays Nigel, stands next to him. They are a little like daemon’s in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.

The adult actors are then replaced by the child actors at a point when the children have decided to put on a play for the parents and to make Maddie feel better after she has been very sick.

At first the children rehearse a play about a princess and kissing and dancing. They call for the adults to come and watch their show but discover they have forgotten about the play and have gone to the pub. Nigel and Lucy are furious and refuse to do the play just for Maddie. So Joy and Bart are left to improvise a new play.

What emerges out of Joy and Bart’s imaginations is a play about a beautiful Nirvana and the arrival of

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Death (played by Joy). Death destroys the final bee on earth and in so doing condemns the whole of humankind, because if the bees die, then we too will die out.

In Joy and Bart’s play, the adults abandon the children and they are left to face Death alone. At first the children despair, but after a visit from an angel (Bart’s dad) they realise that they have got the resources within them to fight Death and win. Nigel and Lucy rejoin the play and through the deployment of a powerful weapon - blackcurrant juice squirted from a carton - the children triumph and Death is defeated.

Their improvised play powerfully communicates the children’s deeply felt experiences and transforms them from victims of their circumstances to creative artists, giving form, as theatre makers, to their imaginations.

There is one other character in the play; a dog called Sandy. Sandy is also played by an adult actor. At the end of the play we also hear Sandy’s perspective on what has happened.

Spoiler alert: at the heart of the play is the ambiguity around who the five characters at the beginning of the play are and how it is gradually revealed that we are watching adult actors playing the four children and the dog. We would ask that you do not explain this aspect of the production to your pupils before you come so that they can experience the discovery of this for themselves.

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MAKING THE PLAYINTERVIEW WITH WRITER/DIRECTOR TIM CROUCHWHY DID YOU WRITE THE PLAY?

Why does anyone write a play? I want to tell a story. I want to create a live moment that is shared between everyone at the same time - the actors and the audience. I want to see what happens. I want people to think and feel and have fun together.

Why did I write this play? All my plays are about how people present themselves to the world. Who we think we are - and who others think we are. Beginners is about a group of people who are just beginning to learn who they are, how they are, what they are - and where they are going!

WHERE DID THE IDEA ORIGINATE?

Theatre - and play - is about pretending to be something or someone else - something slightly different to our everyday lives. We use both to explore situations and ideas and stories safely. I have always been interested in the parallels between children’s play and adult ‘plays’. They are closer than we think. Children are natural dramatists in their play. They structure and create character.

I am fascinated by the journey from childhood to adulthood - what we keep with us as we grow up; what we lose. Where is the ten year old me? Where did he go? Is he still somewhere inside me? Also, when I was ten, what did I think I’d be doing now? What was my idea of being an adult? I remember wanting to be an adult, but not knowing what that really was. I remember watching the adults, pretending to be the adults, but not understanding what that meant. Children play at being adults in an attempt to understand.

The emotions we feel as children are no different to those we have as adults - fear, insecurity, jealously, love. As adults, however, we process and present them differently.

WHAT IS THE PLAY ABOUT?

It’s difficult to talk about this play without giving the game away. I could say it’s about four children but I could also say it’s about four adults. It’s about four people who are flung together every year, the same place, the same time. Four characters who are made to get on with each other. They spend a week each year in a holiday cottage in Cornwall. With them, they bring all the baggage of the previous 12 months of their lives - illness and divorce, new relationships and new hopes. In the week we spend with them during the play, these four gradually work out a way of being together - and more than that. They work out a way to make sense of what is happening to them.

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The play is also a bit of a ghost story. The holiday cottage is believed to be haunted. The four characters are ‘haunted’ by four children. Gradually, the children take over from the adult actors.

CAN YOU TELL US SOMETHING ABOUT THE STAGING?

I started to write this play around the time I was finishing another play - Adler & Gibb. In that play, the form travels alongside the narrative. It begins quite abstract and ends very naturalistically. With Beginners, I’ve done the same sort of thing - but for a young audience. To start with, however, the abstract is not so easy to spot. It takes a little while to realise that the adult actors at the start of the play are not playing adults. They are playing 9 year olds. This is the abstraction. One thing pretending to be something else. Gradually, over the course of the play, the adult actors playing children are replaced by real children. The abstract becomes figurative. The audience slowly understand what these characters really look like, what they really are. To add to this swap, the adult actors reappear playing the parents of those children.

Beginners starts as if it is a play for adults. It ends as a play by children - for children.

The excitement for me is to see how a young audience takes to this journey.

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TEACHER RESOURCES

The activities - which will be added to this pack by January 2018 - are designed to capture children’s imaginations and increase motivation to learn. They will offer a range of possible ways to link with your classroom priorities.

Our teacher resources and CPD support teachers in embedding drama in their curriculum planning. Working through drama allows children to explore things that matter to them within a fictional context, draw on their prior knowledge and apply it to new situations, develop language as they give expression to new understandings and develop emotional intelligence and critical thinking as they see things from different perspectives. It also allows the children to take responsibility, make decisions, solve problems and explore possibilities from within the drama.

DRAMA SEQUENCES WILL INCLUDE:

• Activities which unleash children’s imaginations and give them the chance, like Joy and Bart, to give expression to their creative ideas. Using ‘accept and build’ improvisation techniques that the company use in the development of the piece, children will tap into their creative subconscious to tell their own stories though making their own collaborative plays.

• Activities which will allow children to revisit moments from the play which have resonated with them. Exploring the fictional lives of Lucy, Bart, Nigel and Joy will provide children distance and protection through which to explore the dynamics of adult-child relationships and difficult times in children’s lives, including sickness or death of a parent, parents splitting up and bullying amongst peers.

These activities are currently in development with our partner school and will be available in January 2018. Please email schools@unicorntheatre.com if you would like notification as soon as they are online.

DRAMA ACTIVITIES

BEGINNERSA Unicorn production

Written and directed by Tim Crouch Resource pack written by Catherine Greenwood