Time for Full Commitment

KENNY MATHIESON checks in on progress at Elgin High School

IT IS the last week in May, and the Transform Moray project has reached a vital crux. The team have been working with pupils at Elgin High School throughout the month, and it is now time to make a final definitive commitment to the show they will start to create in earnest from here.

While Alan Penman works next door with the Music group, Graham McLaren, the director of the project, gathers all of the Performance group in the school’s drama studio for a serious talk. He has just outlined the structure of the show that will emerge from the next two and half weeks of intensive work, and McLaren tells the group that now is the last time they will have the chance to opt out of anything they don’t feel comfortable with.

Ruth Crichton stands by ready to note down any defectors. Some come forward with possible time clashes over the crucial days that lie ahead, but no one chooses to opt out of singing, dancing or speaking lines. Everybody counts themselves in.

Transform Moray - The Carnival of Unfortunate Stories (photo - Fin Macrae)

The last four weeks have been spent getting to know the third year group, developing a gradually emerging sense of who might be up to taking a lead part, who would be more comfortable in the ensemble, who might respond to a little extra coaxing and coaching to bring them out.

The Performance groups have been working with Jen Edgar – specialising in dance and movement – and Alasdair Satchel to get them to this point, but Graham now senses the need for more hands on the pump, and has asked Learn Producer Karen Allen if she can find another workshop practitioner, leaving McLaren to take an overview in the hectic two weeks that lie ahead.

Karen duly obliges, and manages to draft in Gareth Nicholls to join the team. The Performance group is only one element in the school’s participation, however. Alan Penman’s Music group represents another creative strand feeding into the project, and there are also Design and Production groups for those who wish to work behind the scenes rather than on-stage. In all, around 120 pupils are involved.
The onus of performing this show has fallen firmly on the young people at Elgin High, and while McLaren regrets that they have been unable to recruit the active participation of groups in the community, they will be represented in the material that feeds into the show, now going under the title The Carnival of Unfortunate Stories.

“That connection will be made in the material, because we do have stories that we gathered from over-60s lunch clubs and pubs in the area and so on, and we will join them up with the material that has come from the kids in the final show,” McLaren explained.

The shape of the final show has been very much dictated by the venue in which it will be presented, the Moulin Rouge Spiegeltent. The lack of a suitable space to transform in New Elgin itself led to the NTS choosing to bring in the famous venue – en route to the St Magnus Festival in Orkney – especially for the show.

McLaren explained that the Spiegeltent virtually dictated a particular theatrical style, and that demand has driven a lot of the aesthetics of the project.
“It would be inappropriate to try to do an urban, post-modern kind of show in that context, and that is one of the things that has been good about the stories we have been gathering, because they do fit in the context of the Spiegeltent.”

A lot of the stories which he was told threw up similar kinds of themes, involving haunted woods and kidnappings and disappearances and bodies fed to the pigs. As he says, there was a touch of the strange goings-on in The League of Gentlemen’s fictional village of Royston Vasey in the air, and he admits to being initially frustrated by that – it wasn’t the kind of beautiful or elegiac stories he was hoping to tell.

He has taken that on board, however, and devised a five-act structure for the final show on the theme of a cursed family in the local community. Each segment will have an accompanying song, and a Master of Ceremonies – another idea inspired by the Spiegeltent – will take us through the show.

There will, Graham says, be a fair bit of dialogue for the participants to master, “but ultimately it will be down to what they feel comfortable doing.”

On the evidence of the workshops I watched, they are certainly not short on enthusiasm. While they were agreed that the work was “tiring”, “needs lots of concentration”, requires them to “speak clearly” and throws up “a lot to remember”, it was also “good fun”, and they seemed up for the challenge that lies ahead.

Elgin High pupils have taken part in two previous NTS projects, The Crucible and The Elgin Macbeth, so the school was aware of the kind of commitment of time and effort that might be involved, although Anne Duncan, the deputy head, admitted that the amount of work had exceeded her own expectations.

Nonetheless she welcomed their participation. Graham McLaren stressed the fact that the school has been very supportive of the whole project, and has added considerably to the amount of access to the children originally negotiated.

The finale will take place in the Moulin Rouge Spiegeltent in the grounds of Elgin High School on 11 and 12 June, with two performances scheduled for each evening,

© Kenny Mathieson, 2009

Links

• National Theatre of Scotland
• NTS Learn