BBC News: Three months after the English riots, a radio play by a writer of Skins and This Is England '86, to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday, provides one of the first dramatic responses to the crisis.
Sunday, November 06, 2011
Making a drama out of riot crisis
BBC News: Three months after the English riots, a radio play by a writer of Skins and This Is England '86, to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday, provides one of the first dramatic responses to the crisis.
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4 comments:
I understand the fear this playwright has about commenting on something so recent however from reading this it sounds like his approach is thoughtful and done in a way that is not judging what happened but instead exploring it. I would also say that some pieces that are responses to incidents like this hold a lot less power a year later than they do when the event is fresh. The playwright feels like his country did not really address the riots after they happened. Maybe this is a way to connect with the community in a larger way to have those discussions. I will be interested to read the reviews.
I agree with Devorah. Often we ask why this play now, and i can't think of a better example with this drama. It's relevant now because the riots happened so recently. For the playwrights work to be effective it had to be now rather then a couple months or years. I think there are many cases were its appropriate to wait to present a piece, i dont think this needs to be one of them. But where is the line when it comes to dramatic pieces based off of real world tragedies and when its appropriate to present them vs the effectiveness of the piece?
Part of me got excited about this article. I really enjoyed the film This Is England: compelling characters rooted in a very hostile political situation but it wasn't over bearing or preachy. So I thought, a radio play about the London Riots might be interesting; I tried to keep myself well-informed about them when they happened. And then I remembered, oh yeah, I'm American radio plays don't really exist here.
This article gives some good insight on how theatrical tastes differ from here to across the pond. In the state we don't immediate begin to make art about current events. For two reasons: the subject might still be too sensitive to touch, or people may forget about it. The exception to this may be the Laramie Project but the actors who built that show took their time and were very sensitive to the town. So there's that. There's also the idea of a radio play that is very foreign to us. There's some children's programming in the form of the radio plays but I can't think of any drama meant for the 18 - 3o something audience in the form of a radio play. Even Bricoloage's pieces are not really an exception: those performances are more about watching a radio play.
I'm not sure why that is.
Wow, a radio play. Who does those anymore? I suppose books on tape are close-ish.
I didn't follow these riots too closely as they were happening (couldn't really remember why they were rioting), but regardless of story, that's a medium it seems we've long forgotten. Radio drama takes away a huge part of what most of us do, but it plays really nicely into Doc's bit about theatricality, or 'the unseen shark': those things we don't see, we fill in with our imagination, and often do a better job than can be physically realized. I hope to hear this.
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