Oh What A Lovely War | Learning Sheet

LEARNING SHEET

First staged in 1963, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop production Oh What A Lovely War is an epic and pioneering musical which explores the horrors and futilities of World War I. Filled with music-hall songs and wartime classics including It’s A Long Way To Tipperary, Good-bye-ee and Oh! What A Lovely War, the production is hilarious and harrowing in equal measure.

Curve’s Chief Executive Chris Stafford and Artistic Director Nikolai Foster said: Joan Littlewood created the ultimate paean for peace with her mighty anti-war play Oh What A Lovely War. With her Theatre Workshop, Littlewood’s seminal work has sadly never felt more relevant or urgent than it does today. We are thrilled our collaboration with De Montfort University continues to go from strength to strength and the talented DMU drama students will breathe new life into this work, reclaiming the play for these troubled times. And we are pleased to introduce our Regional Theatre Young Director Scheme director Lilac Yosiphon, who leads this project.

‘TOTAL’ Theatre At the heart of the ethos for Theatre Workshop was the drive towards creating an ensemble theatre where exercising the imagination was as important as the physical or vocal training that every member of the company participated in. Joan Littlewood referred to this fusion of working equally with uninhibited imagination as TOTAL theatre. Our production of Oh What A Lovely War has been influenced by these guiding principles. We’ve put together a workshop that you can run to get a sense of how we have worked on the production making sure that the play feels as relevant now as it did in 1963, by trusting the imagination of the whole company.

TOTAL THEATRE WORKSHOP STRUCTURE Recommended 2 hour workshop with pre-workshop task.

PRE-WORKSHOP TASK Ask workshop participants to bring an image or an article from war time to the workshop with them. This may be a historical resource or a more current one.

On arrival at the workshop, ask all participants to stick or blue tac their image or article on a wall or board. This will be used later in the workshop.

VOCAL WARM UP Below are two tongue twisters that the Oh What A Lovely War cast have been using as an ensemble vocal warm up. Encourage participants to focus on diction, projection and annunciation. This can be made more challenging by increasing the speed of the tongue twister.

“Irish Wrist Watch” “Fresh Flat Fish”

TRUST EXERCISE Ask participants to pair up. Once in pairs, pairs can pick person A and person B between themselves. Set a challenge for the room, such as person A has to get to this marking on the floor or find this object. The pairs then have to achieve this while person A has their eyes closed and person B is only allowed to communicate through clapping. This is a take on the game “Hot and Cold” but encourages trust and good communication.

ENSEMBLE THEATRE DIRECTING TASK Ask your participants to look at the research board created by the images and articles. Encourage them to pick an image or an article that inspires them to develop a character from, this will be their character for the rest of the session. Allow the participants to spend time discussing these characters in small groups; focus on their emotions, life experience and traits before beginning the activity.

Now all the participants have their characters, ask them to create a tableau in character. You can frame this under a theme, scenario or title, for example “A political cocktail party” “In the trenches” “Returning home to loved ones”.

Once participants have created their tableau, select participants to take the role of director one at a time. Participants will remove themselves from the still image, change one thing in the tableau and return to their original position. This may be a facial expression, a gesture or a pose.

Try to allow as many participants a turn as the director to encourage peer review and contribution to an overall piece.

TOTAL THEATRE IMAGINATION AND IMPROVISATION TASK Before participants move away from their tableau, explain the next task.

At this point, participants are to remain in their character for the rest of the workshop session, we recommend up to a full hour for this task.

When you say, the tableau “unfreezes” and the collective imagination of the ensemble can take the participants in any direction the improvisation goes. Encourage them to be fully immersed in the improvisation, to go with the story they develop as an ensemble and to act and react as the character they have developed would in the given scenario.

REFLECTION When the improvisation comes to a natural conclusion, bring the participants into a circle and allow them to reflect on the workshop.

Prompt questions you can ask include: • • • •

How did it feel to stay in character for the full session?

How did their character develop in this time?

What did they notice about working as an ensemble throughout?

How could these activities be applied to something relevant to their curriculum?

• Did this exercise bring up any thoughts, feelings or emotions they would like to share?

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARK BARNETT AND KIERAN VYAS