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Message from our children Loving Me Patrick Centre Birmingham Hippodrome **** THEATRE, and its cousins cinema and TV,
are powerful tools. They can affect, move, and entertain of courese, all
those who watch generating passion, fear, laughter, despair, joy . . .
all the emotions that make us human. For those on the other side of the footlights
theatre allows people to hide behind a mask of greasepaint and the cloak
of other people's words while, paradoxically, finding and expressing
themselves. Loving Me is theatre in the raw, like a
partly formed sculpture still with a few rough edges but with the
subject clearly shining through. There were a few open wounds on show, a
few moments of bitterness but above all it was a performance full of
honesty, good humour and hope. The cast are all, or were, looked after young
people, a blanket term for those youngsters whose family has become the
system, us, whether in childrens' homes or with foster parents – there
is even an asylum seeker among their number hardly old enough to know
why. We use the names they used on stage, not their
real names, and they all have their own idea of what love is and what it
means to them. There is Angel, always with a smile, who thinks
love keeps us together and wants to make music, or Charmaine who sees
love as music and performing arts. Karina, shining like a diamond, who says you need
love to be happy while Keisha finds love the feeling she has for people
she loves. Long Gone Billy, all spiky energy, sees love as an act of
defiance, two fingers up to the world while for Rina love is having
someone out there who will like you no matter what, love is never being
alone. Daniel sees love as someone liking him for just
being him, for being who he is while Morgan, sadly, does not know what
love is.
Ashley sees love as something we should fight for
when it is not there, that something bigger in our hearts. Shanice
believes if you love someone you will stick together even though
sometimes it can break your heart while Jim Bob sees love as flowing
from the heart. Miss Twigg, a student on placement from Newman
University, sees love as a battle. “Love can be the best feeling in the
world but then it can sometimes leave people in bad places when they do
not get the love they deserve”, while Johnny McCaffrey, another Newman
student says love radiates, something that can be given and received. The youngsters have been short of rehearsal time, the first full run through ended an hour before the first performance, but no one would have known with a performance full of enthusiasm and confidence. The first act was a series of sketches and events
when we saw the problems such as homelessness and heard of the dark
places the minds and lives of some of the youngsters had visited. We
heard of a girl whose foster parents had beaten her, of abandonment and
despair. But there was also the normality of teenage life, the
relationships, the friendships and the laughs. There were also some good original songs, raps
and performance poems. It would be unfair to pick anyone out in what was
a shared performance, a co-operative effort but no reviewer worthy of
the name could fail to be impressed by either Angel's rap or a wonderful
piece of performance poetry, and a feat of memory, from Ashley, or
indeed songs from Charmaine, Long Gone Billy, Keisha, Pari, Daniel and
Jim Bob.
The words were all their own as were their
feelings and their experiences with a little guidance and polish from
director Janice Connolly, better known as Stockport housewife superstar
mum of five Barbara Nice, who is an accomplished actress and is also
artistic director of Woman & Theatre, the organisation responsible for
the show. Janice said: “The inspiration for Loving Me
came from a project that Women & Theatre were asked to deliver
around school attendances and Looked After young people. “It struck me how many of the young people we
worked with enjoyed performing and had real talent. As Looked After
young people, we, the public, are their parents. They are in our
protection. Are we being good enough parents, do we love them
enough and do they love themselves?” The result is a powerful piece of theatre which
our children, after all they are in our care, have written for
themselves. The second act was a send up of a TV game show called Take Me Home where prospective foster parents had to compete to take home that night's star child in care. We saw the foster hopefuls who just wanted a baby of their own, someone who wanted someone to help around the house, or slave labour as we call it, someone who wanted to compete with Angelina Jolie in the baby collection business, someone who just wanted to be on TV and someone just in it for the money. A telling indictment on society on so many levels not least the fact that the game show idea has probably even been considered in some TV executives idle moments. Loving Me was produced with the help of Birmingham Hippodrome Education Department, an unheralded department in the shadow of shows such as The Lion King and War Horse which does valuable work with youngsters and the wider community. It also had the benefit of the Hippodrome's technical team creating professional lighting and sound and theatre staff pitching in to do the front of house and backstage jobs any production needs - one front of house staff turning up to help even ended up on stage in the production - Janice Connolly can be very persuasive.. Loving Me ended with an appearance
by Birmingham's award winning playwright David Edgar, the Chair of the
Eve Brook Scholarship Fund which gives grants to allow Birmingham care
leavers to go to university. He chaired a question and answer session with
four of the cast as the panel and perhaps the most telling and saddest
thing to come out was the fact that the four Looked After youngsters
just wanted by be treated as human beings, treated like everyone else,
on their merits as people. As they said it was not their fault they were
in care. You had to wonder at what abuse, prejudice and
attitudes they had had to face from their fellow man in their young
lives. Apparently there are some 65,000 children in care
in England alone, roughly the same as the population of Tamworth, and
there is a shortage of more than 7,000 foster places. Had the forms been
ready to be signed at the end everyone there would have been willing to
sign up. The power of theatre. Loving Me runs to 15-02-13 Roger Clarke To see the lyrics of the songs visit the Loving Me page on the Women And Theatre website http://www.womenandtheatre.co.uk/projects/loving-me/
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