Fired up

So, it started some time ago. A member of my family was stabbed. Not seriously, but the incident was quite serious. Somebody else got quite seriously injured. And it took me a while, but I knew that I wanted to write about that, so I did. I've been to see shows at OFS over the years. I've been to some workshops. I did the scratch night last autumn, and Lizzie, who runs it, suggested that I should apply for Offbeat. I'd never applied for anything as big as Offbeat before, and that was literally the first thing that put the idea into my head. Where I thought, oh wow, I could actually do this. 

I wrote a monologue and then I tried to write the whole play, and I realized it was really dull! I wrote exactly what happened, but real life doesn't translate easily into exciting drama. It takes place over a longer period of time. There's not an obvious climax or even a conclusion. I hadn't a clue what I was doing because I’d never done anything like that. But Antonia, who produces Offbeat, offered a sort of production surgery. She would be available in the cafe to meet with anybody who wanted to apply to talk through their ideas. So I did that, and it was amazing. She helped me so much just to formulate ideas and see it from the point of view of, why would we want to see this show? I'm sure it was that meeting that got me over the fence to be accepted. 

So, I was lucky enough to be selected to do a show. I said that I would do an hour, but I only had 15 minutes of material and some other bits that I knew wouldn't work, so I spent the rest of the year writing the show. I was still tweaking bits of the show right up to performance week. So yeah, it was a long process. Obviously, it was pretty depressing to research the topic. But one thing I came across that I hadn't known about were bleed kits – little bags that can be kept behind a bar in a pub, or on a wall like a defibrillator. This mother, Lynn Bed, has made it her life's work to campaign and raise awareness. She's got bleed kits all over the UK, and there are weekly examples of how they save lives. I thought: ‘I wonder if Oxford's got any bleed kits?’

I was also lucky enough to be chosen to be a supported artist. You get £1000 for developing the production, as well as the £500 performers fee. I thought, wow, all this money. Of course, I soon realised that paying people anything like the real rate for things meant that actually, I ended up quite a bit out of pocket. But I don't regret that. You can't expect people to work for nothing. It was a one woman show, so I paid for a director and a music producer. I first met the director in early August, and we worked together once a week, until just before the show. Her support was invaluable, because I was kind of working in a vacuum with the script. She was brilliant with all those suggestions that helped evolve it into a clearer message. 

The one vision I knew I had about the show was to work with a local music producer who's also a youth work provider. I wanted to use the voices of young people who'd been involved with knife crime. Real people talking about their experiences. The recordings of those young people were interspersed between bits of the live performance. The guy said that I could go along to interviews. And I thought, oh, yeah, I really want to. And then I thought, actually, no, because they're not going to tell a middle-aged woman the same stuff that they will tell a youth worker who's probably male and almost their peer. 

The interviews were incredible and were really humbling for anybody to listen to. Nobody could go and write that stuff. We think we know what young people's experiences are, but it's not the same as the way they word it. One of the young people involved was my son, who'd obviously been through that experience. It was hard for him to do that, but I think he was sort of pleased in the end that he did. Maybe it was therapy for me in a weird way. I don’t know. I think for my family, it was maybe quite hard to see the show. 

In early summer, I was offered a series of workshops to do with the production side: marketing, lighting and sound production. It was amazing. This guy called Mark basically takes on shows and acts as a sort of agent-producer. It made me realise that I was very naive about what it all involved. I'd produced plays at the college where I work, but it's a different thing altogether when you're out in the real world. There were other artists, but it would be nice if there had been another chance to meet them. There was an aftershow party for Offbeat, but I couldn't go, so I never got to sort of talk to them as much. 

The timing of Offbeat was perfect for me, because I have most of July and August off, so I could spend all of that time working on the show. I sort of cheated myself out of my summer. Most of my rehearsal was done at home. I'd be thinking, oh good, my daughter's at work. I'll go and rehearse in her room. My son's just made his dinner, I'm gonna rehearse in the kitchen. Another nice part of Offbeat is they offer you free rehearsal space within a two week period in August. Coming here and rehearsing, I was just thinking, I get supported to make a show and come and like, work in a theatre all day. That is so lucky. Also, having two days in the Burton Taylor was essential. 

Weirdly, they had the Oxford Knife Crime Summit the week before my show. I knew from working with Inspire that anecdotally, there's a hell of a lot of unreported knife crime here. People think, oh, Oxford's really posh and it doesn’t go on here, so that was another thing I wanted to show. I've never fundraised for anything before or cared in that way, but yeah, that made me be quite passionate.

Everybody was allocated one performance, but a show was cancelled and my show was selling really well. In fact, by then it was sold out. So I got another show on the Saturday, and that sold out as well. I was so lucky. Quite a few people came who I didn't know and we reached our target - the council is going to install two bleed kits.

I think now I've got the confidence to take this forward. I suppose I found a cause that I’m fired up about. Obviously, I love the idea of making theatre, but I didn't realise how important the other side of it would be to me. How much the research phase made me think that lots of those bereaved families haven't got a voice. I'm in a privileged position that I have a platform to make a piece of art that gets people to take notice.

I want to do a kind of storytelling project. Maybe unconsciously it was inspired by this. The working title is ‘Knife Crime Stories That Hit Home.’ I want to interview family members of people, not just victims of knife crime. My ambition is that this could be made into a film and taken to some sort of policy maker. Rather than just saying, kids shouldn't carry knives, full stop. We should ask, why are kids carrying knives? What can we do about that? What can schools do? What can youth work do?

Everybody at OFS was lovely and helpful. They had a really positive, can-do attitude that inspired me to think that maybe I can do that too. Antonia has been amazing. I talked to her yesterday, you know, she gave up her time to sort of offer me advice, talking about funding bids and stuff. That's not part of her job, but this is more than the job, you know? I just can't speak too highly of Offbeat, and what it’s done for me and everybody involved. I'm incredibly grateful for the experience.