Having the opportunity to do absolutely anything for our first piece of theatre was both daunting and exciting, and so we spent one of the meetings as a company discussing what we wanted to do. As we were already agreed upon the idea of a farcical straight play, but was unsure of where we wanted to go with it, we decided to explore the different decades and see if we were drawn to any of them. As we wanted to focus on the issues within the world, we wanted to try and find correlations between the issues within these decades, and the issues within the world of today, and we found that the 1990’s was the best era for this. Within this, we found that 1997 was the best year. We conducted this research during the first few meetings as a group, we adopted a method that we learnt during a workshop with Flickbook Theatre Company in which we were given a specific topic such as ‘technology’ and researched it before feeding back what we had learnt to the group. With the ages of the cast, and the target audience of those 16 and up who enjoy comedy, the piece would also be a very nostalgic piece for those who grew up in the 90’s. During 1997, the world was experiencing ever-advancing technology and battling with terror in the form of the IRA (UPDATE: there has also been a snap election called by a Conservative government), and these are issues that are being experienced within the world today with the new technology emerging as well as the war on terror. Due to the fact that I did not wish to have any blackouts within the piece, we would use original broadcasts within the piece to both show the passing of time throughout the play, but would also use these broadcasts as transitional periods, and have the characters interact and prepare for the next scene on stage in front of the audience.

Research method adapted from the workshop with Flickbook Theatre Company

With the piece taking shape, we now have to begin funding the company in order to transfer the ideas onto the stage. We have been able to begin within the loan from the University of £166; however, we are putting on some fundraisers between now and our performance date on the 24^th of May. We have decided to put on a 90’s themed quiz in order to maintain a theme between our work and the fundraising events for it. In addition to this we will hold a film night in the platform and play a 90’s classic film, however this film has yet to be decided upon. In addition to our own fundraising, we had to think about applying for funding from the Arts Council England (ACE) due to the fact that we were setting up our own theatre company, but also if we want to proceed with the company in the future we will have to do so. We found that if we were to apply for money for our company, we would do so through the Grants For Arts Programme as this is specified as “ a single group of people working towards a shared or common goal” (Arts Council, 2016).

Works Cited: Arts Council (2017) Arts Council England. London: Arts Council England. Available from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Grants_for_the_Arts_How_to_apply15k_and_under_September2016_0.pdf [accessed 9th March 2017]