Tuned in

In 2009, Women & Theatre was awarded funding specifically for projects led by young people. We came up with ‘Tuned In’, working with young people to create a series of original, short plays for radio, to be written by the young people. We were keen to find two Birmingham secondary schools where students’ experiences of life may differ. We approached St Alban’s Academy (a mainstream inner-city comprehensive) and Priestley Smith School for the visually impaired. Priestley Smith has 29 pupils, ranging from 11 to 18 years of age. We worked with a single class of year 9 English students at St Alban’s and at Priestley Smith we worked with the whole school.
 

Each school created three radio plays in their own words – with the help of professional writers. The plays were then swapped with the other school, rehearsed and recorded at BBC Birmingham with the help of professional directors, editors and sound engineers. To kick-start the project we held an ‘Inspiration Day’ to bring students, staff and artists together. We listened to extracts of radio drama, and met Ryan Kelly who regularly appears on ‘The Archers’ (himself visually impaired). We discussed the medium and went off in groups to listen to the sounds of the world around us.
The young people engaged in a collective writing process – not a common experience for writers. Their first task was to consider exciting or interesting settings for a radio play. The ideas were fascinating and ranged from airports to war zones, haunted buildings to forests, being inside a computer game to being inside a cupboard. They then had to make a decision as a group and select the world of their play. This is quite a sophisticated process of letting go of ideas – as well as holding on to one – which the young people handled well. They went on to create the characters and to break the story up into sections, which were written by members of the group in pairs or threes. The result is six absolutely cracking radio dramas written by young people on subjects completely of their own choosing. Listen out for ‘The Forest of Doom’, ‘The Haunted Mansion’, ‘The Daydream’, ‘School for Superheroes’, ‘La Piccolo Teatro’ and ‘The Lighthouse’, as we are exploring avenues for broadcast.
By far the most important and memorable aspect of the day for the young people was meeting one another. Some of them had been quite apprehensive about the day; some had simply not been around anyone with a visual impairment and weren’t sure what to expect. Others expected confident, noisy people from a much larger school and were a bit worried. Perceptions and concerns shifted by the end of the day and friendship took over. Yosuf Mahamed, from St Alban’s said, “At first I thought that it would be hard to work with someone less able than me but I saw how confident they were and that made me confident as well.” Young people are meeting other young people whose life experience is different from their own and discovering they have a lot in common. We all become better ‘tuned in’, in all sorts of ways and on all sorts of levels as a result.