Course leader Gavin Bell said “Students gathered research through first-hand interviews, articles and real life accounts of events which were then transformed into monologues and one person show scripts. Through the project students gain insight into the benefits of producing your own work, the opportunity to show work at Fringe events like Edinburgh and more locally, and explored how to make shows more accessible to wider audiences as well as the ethics of verbatim theatre.”

Speaking of the of their chosen areas of interest students Miles Foster and Lyla Dawson commented, “in this project we explored verbatim theatre and the fringe events, we all chose our own stimulus, mine being animal captivity and miles’ being about what you wanted to be when you got older.”

Verbatim theatre uses real life experience to inform documentary style performances which relies on conducting extensive research, they continued, “we explored our stimulus by looking at online interviews and conducting our own interviews off and on campus.  For me (Lyla) personally I also looked at the sea world website and watched a few documentaries. Miles did his own interview outside of college and based his piece around that, he also looked at interviews from Trent Alexander Arnold, a boyhood Liverpool supporter who worked his way into the academy and is now one of there most decorated players.”  

His piece centres around “a footballer who works so hard to fulfil his dream, However when the media paint his life out to be perfect they get a huge shock as the player reveals his struggles outside of football and how he only grew up with his mother. My favourite part of the monologue was when I had to speak about which player was my idol because it meant I could talk about Trent Alexander Arnold.”

Concentrating animal captivity in particular Orca wales Lyla created a multi-media performance, “my characters where Daisy a 6 year old girl who was writing about her day at sea world in her diary, Laura is a worker at sea world who witnessed the death of Dawn Brancheau who was killed by an Orca there. I most enjoyed making the multi media for my performance and doing my staging, the most challenging part was the multi-rolling. My favourite part of my monologue was when i’m playing Daisy ’cause it shows the innocence of not knowing the truth and how everything is much more enjoyable as a kid”

Speaking of working with Jonah and what they learnt from the project they said, “when working with Jonah York we watched his play Farther unknown and he discussed the process of creating a verbatim, we learn a lot from this project, we learned how to compose our own “one person show” we learnt how to multi roll and write our own piece around whatever we want. We developed lots of storytelling ideas and learnt overall how to be more creative.”

If you are interested in studying Acting and Performance at college level make sure you check out UAL Extended Diploma in Acting for Stage & Screen, details on the course and how to apply here.