Hello. It is a rainy Friday afternoon at the end of June. We go into rehearsals on Monday for Origins. The Pentabus office has been alive with activity-printing scripts, gathering rehearsal props, getting a last minute MOT on our (rusty but trusted) van which will take the aforementioned props to London. It is all rather exciting. Today has also been the last day of my epic journey-ing around the Shropshire countryside, delivering workshops to students in over 20 schools. Phew. What a month. All I can say is, thank god for my Sat Nav. Without it I think I might still be driving aimlessly around tiny country roads, getting stuck behind YET ANOTHER tractor. Or lorry. Or massive big potato gathering machine. It has been a brilliant four weeks. I have worked with students from ages 8-19, introducing them to the world of the play. We have explored what it might have been like to be a young Charles Darwin. We have thought about comedy. And then tried to make some. With varying results. We have been animals, boats, babies, school teachers, doctors, angry parents, taxidermists, ill people of Shrewsbury. We have looked beyond Charles Darwin’s bushy beard and bushier eyebrows, thought beyond the fact he has a shopping centre named after him and that he is on a ten pound note. We have considered what happened before all of this, through students devising their own work, to working on excerpts from the play. I have been to tiny primary schools where there were only 60 students in the whole school, to private schools in utterly beautiful buildings (think Hogwarts and then some) with thousands of students (felt like thousands anyway). And I have to say, at the beginning of all this, I thought I might be slightly tired of these workshops by now. Not so. Every group of students I have worked with engaged with the themes, characters and ideas within the play on so many different levels, producing such a variety of inventive, imaginative and often brilliantly funny results that there has been no opportunity to get tired. Particularly with the text work. I always really looked forward to giving groups the text because I loved hearing what they made of it. And most students seemed to really engage with the tone and throw themselves into exploring how it could be performed. And I don’t think I will ever forget the work of a group of 4 boys in one school. They were obviously the ‘funny ones’, and because of that, were never allowed to work together in their lessons. So when they got their heads together to devise a moment in Charles Darwin’s life, the results were pretty hilarious. They performed with no words a scene showing Charles being at one with nature, skipping around the countryside, the others becoming a different plant/animal/creature that Charles went from joyfully discovering, to picking/killing/bottling for his collections. The memory of Charles (one 6 foot boy) wrestling with a ‘plant’ (another 6 foot boy) as he struggled to pull it out of the ground, then stick it on his wall will make me laugh I think until the end of time.

When I got back to the office after my final workshop, there was a letter waiting for me on my desk, from one of the students I had worked with. She had written on behalf of her class a thank you. A bit of a lovely thing to round off the month I think. I may just include it at the end of this blog-I have never received a thank you letter before for my work before. Kinda like it…..

The main objective of these workshops was to get schools aware of the company, and interested in coming to see the show in Shrewsbury. It certainly felt like I had caught the attention of at least some of the schools I visited, but time will tell I guess, to see if they buy tickets….Meanwhile, we have the small adventure of the Fringe to experience, before we get to Shrewsbury. Which begins in just a few days, as we start rehearsals in London. Hurrah.

The letter I received:
Dear Kate
On behalf of years 6 and 5 I am writing to thank you for coming to our school to teach us about your play and to help us with our acting. You were a really good teacher and it was great fun, especially making frozen images of scenes from your play. We love acting because you get to pretend to be someone else and learn about what their lives were like. We hope rehearsals for your play go well and everyone likes it in September….

How nice is that???!!!

Hello. I have returned to sunny Shropshire once again. This time I will be mainly exploring the Shropshire countryside. Aided by my trusty sat nav, I have begun my journey of visiting over 20 schools in the area to deliver free workshops about our show Origins, which is being written as I speak. We go into rehearsals at the end of June, which is all very exciting/not very far away.

Had the first workshop today, which was a joyful group of students who really engaged with the ideas of the play. Hurrah. Always a bit nerve wracking the first one, you have no idea if what you planned will work or is good. Definitely some room for improvement, but all things considered it was a lovely beginning. And really fascinating to get new perspectives on the ideas and the world of the play that the writers are working towards. Onwards I go. Meanwhile, the production continues to take exciting shapes around me.

I’m sat in an ‘otel room in Newcastle researching on-line to see how
much corpses were selling for at the beginning of the 19th century.
It’s a scene in Origins where Charles gets embroiled with some grave
robbers (based on a small degree of truth but with lashings of
artistic license). The scene might not make it to the third draft as
the script is still too long, so I’ve cut it down to half its size.
And as it might get completely cut, I researched prices for about a
minute, could only find links to DVD copies of Tim Burton’s Corpse
Bride, and so made it up- 2 guineas. Please blog if you know better.

John Nicolson

It’s a bit terrifying making a play about Charles Darwin. We’re in to April and just about everyone from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Stewart Lee has already had their say about him. I’m lucky enough to work for the BBC so I have access to the archived programmes across radio and TV. I’ve listened to and watched many people’s thoughts on the biology, the religious implications, the ethics, the geology, the impact on literature, the creation on Scientology. I made that last bit up. But you name it, there’s a programme about it. Thankfully, though, no one else seems to have embarked on a entertaining familial re-imagining of his youth with actors, puppets and beautiful projections. And chickens. It’s also a comedy. Or at least we hope it will be. There haven’t been that many Darwin comedies. There might be a gap in the market. Or it may be that everyone else in the world has had the good sense to stay away. Except me, John and Orla.

Not very coherent but these are my thoughts as we approach the end of the second draft of a play that has come to known as Origins. The first draft was a mess so we’re hoping this one might be a bit better. Or at least less of a mess. But just wait for the third draft, that’ll be excellent. And as for the fourth….well we’ll come to that when we come to it. For now, I’m going to go to back to reading everything and then ignore it in favour of a couple of jokes.

Steven Canny