Creating and sharing monologues – an update from our core creative group

Hello, hello! How are you all doing? Safe and well I hope.

This week we got together with our core creative group for the second time. It was magical.

Two weeks ago we set people the creative challenge of writing a monologue, no longer than a minute long, that welcomed the rest of the group to their home. We gave them some prompts, some starting points and left them to it.

On Monday night, we asked people to switch to ‘Speaker Mode’ on the zoom call, so that as each person took their turn to speak, everyone could see them, and only them. The way we would give focus to a performance in a normal workshop setting.

It was a curiously moving experience. There was such honesty, intimacy and power in each performance. Part of what made it so special, was the live-ness of it. The fact that we weren’t recording it, but that it will live in our memories.

There is SO much more we could do with these starting points. We want to develop them. To shape them. To draw the best performance possible out of each individual. To embed them into a longer performance we have been working on since January about the tales of life in Brighton.

For now, though, we are sharing one with you in written format. It’s by a young woman called Zara, who first came along to our workshops last autumn. We think that she and her monologue are fabulous. Hope you enjoy it too.

Naomi – BPT Artistic Director

‘Welcome to my couch’ – by Zara

Welcome to my couch, I’ve been here a lot more than usual lately. I can see my bed, my kitchen, my photos, my hoover, my ornaments, my washing, my cuddlies, my CDs, my books, and my giant unicorn head…

I can hear the birds tweeting outside, my washing machine spinning in the hall and cars in the distance. But otherwise, it is very quiet.

I am thinking about how much the world has changed in such a short space of time. Two months ago I was sat in the packed Dome theatre watching Ed Byrne. He joked about the pandemic and we laughed it seemed at the time like something that was happening far away something that wouldn’t affect us like Ebola or swine flu before. The week before that I went all the way to London on a bus, a national rail train, and the tube. Now both those things sound impossible.

I am thinking about the new normal where I have to meticulously plan a trip to buy food. Where I don’t go to work or to see friends or to groups.

However I am also thinking about the new things that occupy my time; craft, and exercise challenges, and zoom calls, and learning languages, and writing and appreciating normality in a way I never have before.

I am feeling anxious and fearful, content and peaceful, pessimistic and optimistic, lonely and depressed, free and happy, ignorant and knowledgeable, fulfilled and bored, lucky and unlucky, struggling, coping, failing, flying.

I’m here, can you hear me?