Output details
29 - English Language and Literature
University of Nottingham
The Three Christs Project: evidence box: completed playscript, drafts, archival materials, videos of devising and script development process, and of professional performed reading of final script
Purpose
The purpose of this project was to explore and develop narrative and dialogical strategies by which ‘madness’ and ‘mad’ characters might be written for the stage, maintaining a balance between: representation of illness, specifically paranoid schizophrenia; representation of character, inasmuch as this can be separated from characters’ illness; and the presentation of a play with sufficient reference points, points of access and contexts to establish and maintain audience engagement. Inherent in this last was an acknowledgement of the need for the development and inclusion of a variety of dramatic components (identified by Stanislavski, Spencer and others), such as action, motivation, need, event, objective, arc and super-objective. And through this balance to arrive at a draft of the play, suitable for professional and public performance, in which would be established an ethical, albeit idealised position where character and identity may be seen to exist autonomously of illness.
Methodology
The development of the script occurred through an iterative process of archival research, medical and historical research, devising workshops, scripted workshops and rehearsals and a professionally staged and public reading, outlined below:
November 2008 – visit Michigan State University, Milton Rokeach archive to view records, notes and observations by patients and medical personnel regarding Rokeach’s ‘Three Christs’ experiment in Ypsilanti (1959-1961). Insight into minds, behaviours, lives of patients suffering from paranoid schizophrenia within wider and rich historical and political context (civil rights, Kennedy, war and Cold War, space exploration). Creative springboard for:
April – July 2009 – workshops, rehearsals, script developments with actors, director and designer from Nottingham Playhouse (£10,000, University of Nottingham Knowledge Transfer Fund)
July 2009 – January 2013 – series of drafts
January 31st 2013 – professional, public staged reading of ‘Found’, Nottingham Playhouse
