Violence, teen-parent relationships and marriage breakdown are some of the themes Chris Cooper addresses in his workshops with teenage school children. Veronica Stivala learns why theatre is social.
A group of teenage girls file into the school gym. All they have been told is that they are here for a drama lesson.
Cooper never even mentioned the word ‘violence’ in the school workshops, nor did he explain to the students what they were doing
They are greeted by Chris Cooper, a theatre director and educator from the UK who simply introduces himself as Chris. Contrary to what one might expect, Cooper’s talk is not greeted with giggling or whispered chatter.
Cooper is engaging. He tells the girls he needs them to help him understand a recent crime. This they can do because the victim, Joanna, was a 16-year-old girl, a couple of years older than them, and they can understand the situation better than him, he explains. Joanna died from a knife wound to her stomach – true story.
The director guides the group of 13- and 14-year-olds around various scenes he has set up. Moving to a tape equivalent of the chalk outline of a dead body with a pair of jeans jigsawed into it, the director tells the girls they are in an abandoned field where Joanna was found murdered. He takes a book, whose pages have been slashed, out from a black school bag and asks the girls to tell him what else they can ‘see’.
In this dimly-lit gym at Santa Margerita Żejtun Girls Secondary School, Adrian Buckle, Unifaun Theatre producer and organiser, also takes part. He explains to the girls that they may speak in Maltese if they feel more comfortable and that he will translate anything Cooper says that they don’t understand.
Although the girls are Maltese-speaking and sometimes struggle to find the right words or conjugations in English, every single one of them makes this effort and even when offered translating aid, they refuse. It is quite remarkable how within the space of a few minutes (the class lasts around an hour), Cooper has won the girls’ support and respect.
One by one they begin to chip in, and the scene slowly comes to life: torn newspapers lie in one corner, an empty cigarette packet just over there.
Cooper was in Malta as part of a week-long visit to six schools with students from challenging backgrounds as well as for drama in education workshops with Drama Unit teachers. The theme of his workshops was violence.
The director also held a weekend master class in contemporary theatre with adults, which I attended, where he ran workshops on new methods of acting. This included exploring how to judge a role and the huge difference even the smallest detail in props, intonation and timing can make to a scene.
In this master class we explored two plays of Edward Bond, an English playwright who is considered controversial because of the violence shown in his plays. He is notorious for his play Saved (1965) which was originally refused a licence because of its ‘stoning of a baby scene’.
The story of this play interestingly bears strong similarities to our local ‘drama’ regarding Unifaun’s trials and tribulations to produce Anthony Nielson’s Stitching – admittedly with a difference of around 40 years between them. Saved was eventually given its first public run in 1969 following the abolishment of theatre censorship in the UK in 1968.
It is important to mention the disturbing scenes in these plays because the aim behind them was, as Bond said in a recent interview with The Telegraph, “telling you something you need to know. What you do is push the contradictions in society to an extreme, and out of that extreme you can say, ‘this is what is happening to you’.”
In Saved, a woman has her stocking provocatively darned by her daughter’s admirer; a baby is stoned to death by a group of youths. The theme of social disenfranchisement as seen by Bond is very relevant to the present day – think of the London riots last year, for example.
So in an interesting reversal of situations, Cooper – who has directed some of Bond’s works in the UK – used drama to explore gang violence, marriage breakdown and teen/parent relationships with the students.
Cooper never even mentioned the word ‘violence’ in the school workshops, nor did he explain to the students what he or they were doing, which, had he done so, would perhaps not have worked quite as well as it did.
This is what Cooper is trying to get across by saying that theatre is social. Theatre has a social message: it has something to say about society. It engages the audience as well as the performers to think and question what is being staged, about people’s background and what has led them to behave the way they do.
The workshop evolved into a scene between a teenager and her dad who was trying to communicate with her following his separation with her mother.
Following a very brief briefing from Cooper, the students enacted (for want of a better word because they were not really acting) the situation, making up the conversation as they went along.
Speaking after the workshop, Cooper said he was impressed at how involved the teenagers were in the scenes: the dialogue they came up with was clever and moving.
This was the product of a mere hour’s work. Who knows what regular such workshops would lead to.
The other schools visited were San Ġorġ Preca College’s Maria Assunta Girls Secondary School and Marsa Boys Secondary School; St Claire College’s Gżira Boys Secondary School and St Andrew’s Boys Secondary School and St Margerita College Cospicua Girls Secondary School.
Organised by Unifaun Theatre Productions, this project is part of a three-phase project which culminates with Cooper directing Olly Prison next March. This project was funded by the Malta Arts Fund and the National Lotteries Good Causes Fund.