Play for performance: Ozymandias

Ozymandias is a play written for now, set during a global pandemic in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, exam results scandal and just as the first lockdown started to ease in the summer.

It's set in a town that is just like your town. It's about a group of pals that are just like your students, just like me, just like us. One night following their exam results, in the middle of a pandemic, this group of ordinary young people hatch a daring plan to do something extraordinary.

This is a play about going on an adventure with your friends. It's about taking action, standing up to power, oppression and injustice. It's a play for anyone who has spent the last few months missing being with their mates; anyone who got results for an exam they never sat; anyone who has spent the last few months wanting to do something about the state of the world.

Behind the scenes

Wonder Fools always take on an investigative journalism approach to playwriting, working directly with the communities that the stories we stage concern. This project was no different, even though we were tasked with creating it during lockdown. We worked with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and their Widening Access to the Creative Industries group – a team of young people aged 13–19. We met weekly online throughout the summer and created the play in collaboration with the group.

It all started with a provocation of asking the young people what was alive for them in the moment they were all living through. The play quickly became a response to current events, and we used Percy Shelly's 1818 poem of the same name as a stimulus for this enquiry. This poem provided the group with a way for us to talk about the critical discourse that was going on at the time about statues and their role in society, power and injustice. Incidentally, Ozymandias is also the name of our favourite Breaking Bad episode, which also gets a wee nod in the script too.

Casting

The play features lots of larger-than-life characters and is a text flexible enough to do with five people or 105 people. So, it's perfect if you're unsure about how many participants you'll have and is also an effective piece for helping ensembles develop how they tell stories together. The play features third-person descriptive narration throughout, so it gives ample opportunities for young people to take on varying-sized roles in the production. Regarding casting the piece, it requires one female identifying PoC actor and one male identifying white actor. The rest is totally up for grabs and any of the supporting characters' gender pronouns can change depending on your group.

Questions asked

Some of the questions we were thinking about when writing this in terms of staging were: How do the characters or storytellers sound, look and move? What are the different ways of showing the story as well as telling it? What different rhythms work best for the different sections in the play with narration? What is the most interesting way of starting the performance? What is the most interesting way of finishing the performance? There's also an exercise at the end of the script about young people writing a letter to a local MP or prominent person and there's no reason why these letters can't be used as part of the performance too.

Ozymandias was written as part of Positive Stories for Negative Times, a new national participatory project by Wonder Fools, co-commissioned with the Traverse Theatre. This project responds to the lack of physical spaces for young people to participate in creative activities due to the pandemic, and instead allows them to come together to make new work online or live in the space if government guidelines allow. Therefore, this piece has been designed so it can be made from home in total lockdown if needed.

In addition to Ozymandias, Positive Stories for Negative Times has commissioned some of the UK's most exciting voices to write new plays for young people including Sabrina Mahfouz, Stef Smith, Chris Thorpe, and Bea Webster. The plays are written specifically for the times we are living in and will be free to participating groups between the ages of 8 and 25 from September 2020—June 2021.If you would like your group to work on Ozymandias or explore any of the other Positive Stories for Negative Times plays, they are completely free to access for the next six months. You can also buy a copy of the complete collection of plays from Methuen.

www.positivestories.scot