About this ebook
Fast is an ensemble play for teenage performers created by award-winning playwright Fin Kennedy.
Fast was commissioned by Y Touring theatre company, and was workshopped at Regent High School in Camden, London, before being performed as part of a young people's summer school run by Y Touring in August 2014.
Fin Kennedy
Fin Kennedy is an award-winning playwright of theatre and radio whose plays are regularly produced in the UK and abroad. In 2021 he set up Applied Stories, a digital production company making audio drama and online training. His first play Protection was produced at Soho Theatre in 2003, where he was also Pearson writer-in-residence. His second play How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found won the 38th Arts Council John Whiting Award and has been produced around the world. It has become a firm favourite with student and amateur performance groups and is among Nick Hern Books' most licensed plays. Fin has 20 years' experience writing for teenagers, often through a process of being embedded in an inner-city school or youth theatre. His first two plays for teenagers, Locked In (2006) and We Are Shadows (2008) were produced by Half Moon Young People's Theatre and toured nationally. Life Raft (2015) for Bristol Old Vic Young Company, has been translated into German and French for use in schools across Europe. From 2006-2014 Fin was writer-in-residence at Mulberry School for Girls in east London, for whom he has written seven plays, published in two volumes by Nick Hern Books as The Urban Girl's Guide to Camping and other plays and The Domino Effect and other plays for teenagers. Fin also writes for radio and has had ten Afternoon Plays broadcast on BBC Radio 4 including The Good Listener, a returning series set inside GCHQ and On Kosovo Field, a collaboration with musician PJ Harvey. Fin's most recent venture is the UK's first fully online Playwrighting for Teachers course, to pass on many of the original creative writing exercises he has devised over the years.
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Book preview
Fast - Fin Kennedy
Fin Kennedy
FAST
NICK HERN BOOKS
London
www.nickhernbooks.co.uk
Contents
Title Page
Introduction
FAST
Author’s Note
Original Production
Fast
Endnotes
About the Author
Copyright and Performing Rights Information
Introduction
Fin Kennedy
I first experimented with writing for an ensemble in my very first play for teenagers, East End Tales, a series of dramatic poems about inner-city life, written for multiple voices and inspired by articles in East London newspapers. At the time (2004) I was writer-on-attachment at Half Moon Young People’s Theatre, developing my first professional play for young audiences for a national tour. That play, Locked In, involved only three actors, largely because they were all professionals who needed paying – and also because the entire show had to fit into the back of a van. East End Tales, however, was the result of a short residency in an East London school, into which Half Moon sent me as part of my own professional development as I learned to write for their target age group.
Writing a play for young people themselves to perform, as opposed to professional actors performing for an audience of young people, is a very different thing. For a start, in the former, large casts are actively encouraged so that as many people as possible can take part. This presents challenges as well as opportunities. Maintaining coherent storylines and meaningful character arcs for ten, fifteen or even twenty named roles is not always possible, especially when the overall running time is unlikely to exceed forty-five minutes. Then there is the nature of rehearsals stretching over weeks or even months, and the likelihood of cast changes due to teenagers’ busy lives, clashes with other projects or just general dropouts.
One technique I developed to deal with these variables is a choral writing style, which uses nameless narrators to introduce and guide the telling of the story. This can accommodate anything from two to twenty narrators in the chorus. Often the language is in a playful, lyrical style, which makes the lines easier to learn – the idea is that everyone learns the lot, so that in the event of cast changes (or drying on stage) others can cover the lines. This form also plays to one of teenagers’ great strengths – acknowledging the audience and telling them a story directly. Young actors are naturally good at this, and audiences love its conspiratorial nature. Other, named parts can and do emerge, but the chorus of narrators is never far away.
The three plays contained in this volume are therefore for large casts of young actors aged thirteen to nineteen. Cast sizes can vary due to this ensemble style, but the minimum is about eight (for The Domino Effect, though it can be done with more), and the maximum about sixteen (for The Dream Collector). Fast is more fixed as it uses named characters throughout, and tries to do justice to giving each of them a journey, but even so it can be performed with either nine or twelve actors (depending on whether the four older parts double or are separated out). Ensemble casting can also include non-speaking parts, who can use physical theatre, dance and music to create stylised representations of the world of the play. In this respect, the only upper limit on cast size is the imagination of the company taking the play on.
Each script in this volume was developed with a different group of diverse young people in inner London, though the characters and stories are universal enough to suit most young people’s groups. The specific circumstances of ethnicity, culture and geographical location are less important than a strong ensemble ethos. A willingness to experiment with a physical performance aesthetic will help significantly, as will a commitment to working together to create the onstage magic necessary to tell these stories in a way which will delight an audience, allow transitions to unfold smoothly, and communicate each story’s emotional truth.
Each play was conceived under different circumstances and it may help those of