“Souvenirs” – Preview

Walking into the Souvenirs rehearsal, the first thing that struck me was sheer chaos; fantastic, intriguing, playful, but undeniable chaos. A mound of newspapers in one corner, a litter of wine bottles in another, and diligent directors dragging in cardboard boxes to add to the clutter. Sheer, beautiful chaos.

Even having no idea of the logic of the setting, I immediately began creating links between these strange mini-environments. Was there a sense of loss in all of this, or the joy of creating new worlds from complete anarchy? Much of the joy of Souvenirs lies in this sense of wonder and discovery one gets from watching the performers create their own logic for their new world and knowing, even at this late stage of rehearsal, it is still a piece-in-development. Director Sam Wightman calls on his performers to be honest and instinctive with their responses to the performance world, and the results are clear to see.

Just for a bit of background, Souvenirs is a performance stemming from how we interact with four objects: newspapers, cardboard boxes, wine bottles and fabric. Each object has a story attached to it, which has been co-created by the performance team and one writer dedicated one specific object. Sam Wightman, President of Codpiece, is directing, while Freshblood President Jamie Wright is producing the project. Ollie Higgins, Alex Wallis, Max Kennedy and Grace McCann are the four writers, working closely with dramaturge Peter O’Brien in creating four individual stories for the piece. It’s an extremely ambitious working model, and one that allows for many different voices to be heard in creating the performance.

However, this huge production team has been adamant in their desire to allow creative ownership to the performers: Kitty Murdoch, Alex Welsh, Ella Tebay, Oscar Owen, Ellice Stevens and Tommy Loftus. The strength of the ensemble is one of the most striking aspects of the performance, as each of their unique styles are harnessed whilst still remaining a compelling whole. The section I caught saw the performers playing with cardboard boxes, and the sheer number of uses they found from torn cardboard was quite extraordinary. The performers began separately, exploring the multitude of possibilities that the torn cardboard provided them, but over the course of the scene (I won’t spoil the story) their playing becomes united, and the results are quite spectacular.

I spoke to Ellice Stevens to get a glimpse into how the project has combined devising and new writing. The performers began by playing with each object, both devising and simply exploring the many strange and unusual ways that they could interact with them. Writers would sit in on the rehearsals and take notes whilst their object was being explored, before going away and drafting a creative response to what they saw. Some of these have come in the form of scripts, some monologues and some poems, which have then been handed back to the performance team to stage and adapt. While this has resulted in the creation of four self-contained scenes, four separate stories to be told in performance, Ellice describes one of her favourite moments as being the incidental overlaps between themes and ideas in the different writers’ work. She said that, in connecting these scenes, the performance raises the question of whether they are “memories attached to certain objects, or just imaginings?”

Sam Wightman had a few words of advice about the process of creating a studio show, as the cross-society collaboration between Codpiece and Freshblood is a fresh development in student theatre at the Arts Centre Studio. He was very pleased with how much working with both devising and writing has opened up the process, but found the development period of six weeks to be very challenging for such a project, although clearly the team has found a way to make it work extremely well. His words of wisdom for those thinking of submitting for the Studio: ‘Never overestimate the amount of time you have. I can’t believe how quickly six weeks has gone by!’

So if wild, wacky, chaotic collaboration is your kind of thing (and I can’t see why it wouldn’t be), come along to Souvenirs next week and enjoy a project that started from nothing more than a wine bottle, a piece of fabric, a newspaper and a cardboard box.

Souvenirs will be showing at the Warwick Arts Centre Studio next week, from Wednesday 12^th-Saturday 15^th of November at 7:45 each day. Tickets are available at Box Office or from the Arts Centre website.