Guest Blog: Jemma McDonnell On Verbatim Theatre and ASK ME ANYTHING

The Paper Birds began making verbatim work in 2008. We were midway through our devising process for our show In a Thousand Pieces when we took to the streets with dictaphones.

At the time, we had not heard of verbatim theatre and were just looking to add some other voices to the themes raised within the show. This was a major turning point for the company. These other voices made for powerful and insightful material.

We quickly realised that simply collecting and displaying a variety of real attitudes and experiences within a show had a massive impact on the way in which the audience received and experienced the production. The show was not only for them, it was about them; it included the voices, stories and experiences of their community. Plus offering people a platform to share their stories and experiences was empowering and a political act itself.

This approach to working - the inclusion of our communities within the work, be it verbatim or not - has been a massive trend for many theatre companies of late. But we began to wonder fairly quickly, is taking a dictaphone out enough? Is visiting an area to run one workshop too little? How can we, or any company, have a meaningful relationship with the communities we want to include within our work?

As artists, it's a question we should all be asking ourselves. And this question formed the basis from which we made many decisions around our new show, Ask Me Anything.

We started making Ask Me Anything in 2018 when we undertook two weeks of research and development exploring initial ideas for the show. It was after this time, working at Live Theatre in Newcastle, that we decided that we would approach a number of youth organisations around the UK to partner with us for the show.

Ask Me Anything is based on the real letters that teenagers wrote to us in which they could, as the title suggests, ask us anything. The idea had come from the problem pages we had read when we were growing up, where anonymous teens would get advice from agony aunts.

We wanted to talk about the divisions between generations, we wanted to talk about how different it is for teens growing up now, we wanted to talk about the large number of young people struggling with their mental health. We wanted to talk.

But we were very aware that this project could not just service us and our show. We could not parachute in, take the problems of young people, and then smile and wave as we went on our jolly way to make a show. We had to think about how to best set up, run and manage a project that was responsible.

For us this meant having defined partners involved in the show, we ended up working alongside three schools, three youth theatres and a charity. These partnerships allowed us to have regular communication with the organisations in order to ensure safeguarding, support for the young people, and regular updates and communications.

Live Theatre, who co-produced Ask Me Anything, run a vibrant and thriving youth theatre. This was one of the six youth organisations we worked with in the making of the show. Since we were spending four weeks devising at Live Theatre, we also built in two sessions per week to share sections of the show with The Youth Theatre.

In these sessions, we would show them scenes in which we tried to answer their or other teenagers' questions. The Youth Theatre would then feed back to us, often very honestly and brutally, on how we were, or were not, managing to give them a satisfactory answer to their questions.

As a company, we continue to try to take steps to build more time and resources into our process to ensure strong collaboration with communities. Maybe we should all be held to account in this way when we're working with communities, because if The Youth Theatre has taught us anything it is how important they, and the other young people, were to the development of the show. They pushed us to do better, to be better - at answering their questions, at speaking to a young audience, and at representing them and their generation to others on stage.

Ask Me Anything opens at Live Theatre in January and moves on to the VAULT Festival in February before undertaking a national tour. We hope along the way that many of the young people who wrote to us will get to visit the show and not only hear the answer to their question, but see the production that they were so integral in the making of.

Ask Me Anything at Live Theatre 30 January-8 February, at the VAULT Festival 11-16 February, and then on tour