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    Comment is Free & Start Swimming (NHB Modern Plays): Two Plays
    Comment is Free & Start Swimming (NHB Modern Plays): Two Plays
    Comment is Free & Start Swimming (NHB Modern Plays): Two Plays
    Ebook121 pages56 minutes

    Comment is Free & Start Swimming (NHB Modern Plays): Two Plays

    By James Fritz

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    About this ebook

    Two plays by award-winning writer James Fritz, each asking urgent, pointed and complex questions of the times we live in.
    Ideal for schools, youth theatres and amateur companies to perform, these versatile and incisive plays demonstrate an innovative playwright at the top of his craft.
    In Comment Is Free, a journalist forms the centre of a devastating media storm. After being staged by Old Vic New Voices in 2015, the version published here was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2016, winning both the Tinniswood and Imison Awards for Audio Drama.
    Start Swimming is a play about occupation, revolution and what the future holds for today's youth. One step away from disaster, there's only one thing left to do: start swimming. First staged by the Young Vic Taking Part department, Start Swimming was also performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2017.
    'both a caustic critique of contemporary society's treatment of young people and an exploration of the role of language in the perpetuation and justification of the practices under critique' - Exeunt Magazine on Start Swimming
    'theatrical and fun... radiates a puckishness and sense of mischief that mocks control systems even as it articulates their bleakness' - Time Out on Start Swimming
    'raw and vivid... a powerful indictment of the situation in which many people find themselves' - Scotsman on Start Swimming
    'a brilliant piece... It took my breath away' - Telegraph on Comment is Free
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNick Hern Books
    Release dateNov 18, 2017
    ISBN9781780019796
    Comment is Free & Start Swimming (NHB Modern Plays): Two Plays
    Author

    James Fritz

    James Fritz is a playwright whose work includes: The Flea (Yard Theatre, London, 2023);Lava (Nottingham Playhouse/Fifth Word, 2018; revived 2022);Parliament Square (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, and Bush Theatre, London, 2017);Start Swimming (Young Vic Taking Part, Edinburgh Fringe, 2017);The Fall (National Youth Theatre at the Finborough Theatre, London, 2016);Comment is Free (Old Vic New Voices, 2015; BBC Radio 4, 2016; winner of the Imison and Tinniswood Awards for audio drama, 2017);Ross & Rachel (MOTOR at Assembly George Square, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 2015; 59E59 Theaters, New York);Four Minutes Twelve Seconds (Hampstead Theatre, 2014; Most Promising Playwright, Critics' Circle Awards);Lines (Rosemary Branch Theatre, 2011).

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      Book preview

      Comment is Free & Start Swimming (NHB Modern Plays) - James Fritz

      James Fritz

      COMMENT IS FREE

      & START SWIMMING

      Two Plays

      NHB

      NICK HERN BOOKS

      London

      www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

      Contents

      Title Page

      Introduction

      Comment Is Free

      Start Swimming

      About the Author

      Copyright and Performing Rights Information

      Introduction

      It makes me very happy to see these two plays side by side.

      Comment Is Free started life at Old Vic New Voices in June 2015, in a staged reading directed by Kate Hewitt and produced by Martha Rose Wilson. In the audience was Becky Ripley, an incredibly talented young radio producer who saw the potential for the play to work as an audio drama. Working closely with Becky I rewrote the text with radio in mind, and the play was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in October 2016.

      If you can find a version of the original radio production lurking somewhere on the internet it’s worth having a listen, not least to imagine the long, long hours Becky must have spent in the editing room. Understanding that the feeling of the play’s ‘noise’ is as crucial as its content, she spliced together a hundred different crowdsourced voices who delivered a mixture of written and improvised lines based on the text. The effect was noisy and disorientating in exactly the right way. Anyone thinking about performing this play on stage should feel free to do the same if they so wish – so long as the beats of the story are hit, it’s more important that the noise feels exciting, realistic and terrifying than particularly faithful to the text.

      Start Swimming was made incredibly quickly in the spring of 2017 with director Ola Ince and Young Vic Taking Part. Tasked with responding to Paul Mason’s performance and book Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere (which documented the successes and failures of the various protests and revolutions of 2011), Ola and I worked with a group of twelve young people from Lambeth and Southwark to create a new piece that would transfer from the Young Vic to the Edinburgh Fringe. Our aim was to make something that would articulate how our cast felt about growing up marginalised in a major city during a time of incredible political upheaval.

      We decided early on to make something that wasn’t specific to any one voice or story in the room, but instead communicated their widely shared feelings of frustration, confusion, anger and powerlessness. This led to the text’s bare, repetitive structure, which in rehearsals (thanks to Ola’s input) was blended with a binary yes/no that would often reset proceedings when the wrong answer was given.

      In Ola’s original production – which staged the text in a sort of hellish gameshow, with the cast elevated on light-up boxes that would choose participants at random – the yes’s (Y) were marked by the ding of a bell, the no’s (X) by a buzzer which gave an electric shock to our committed actors. The effect was exhausting to watch in the best possible way, and the cast were some of the most inspiring, talented people I’ve had the pleasure to work with. Each of them took the offer given to them by the play’s blankness and ran with it, stamping their own authority and identity over every word.

      I’m excited to discover how those same Ys and Xs might be interpreted differently in the future, and how a new company’s voices and experiences might change the meaning of Start Swimming in ways I can’t imagine.

      These two very different texts started life on the same street in London. Their first drafts were written about two years apart – two years in which it felt, and still feels, that the whole world turned upside down. Both attempted to capture a snapshot of this turbulent period. And both represent records of the first time I worked with

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