PRACTICAL WORKSHOP

with Mark Maughan & Tim Cowbury

“Can a dramatic text or performance ever be universal?”

Friday 6th December 4:30 – 6:00pm

Judith E Wilson Drama Studio

The Claim (Oberon, 2018) is a theatre piece written by Tim Cowbury and directed by Mark Maughan (Theatre Makers, a Writer-Director Partnership) that was researched and developed for three years before its first critically acclaimed UK tour in 17/18. It has since played Plaines Plough’s Roundabout auditorium as part of the British Council Showcase in Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2019 and is currently booking an international tour for throughout 2020.

Taking the slippery nature of translation and the Home Office’s interview process for granting asylum as its initial sources of inspiration, we set out to create a piece that was as engaging for those with little to no knowledge or experience of the process as it was for those who have lived experience of this flawed official system.

We embarked on an integrated and lengthy research and development period, with the support of migrant organisations and asylum seekers and refugees.

This workshop will cover how Tim came to write a text that is in turns absurd, hilarious and ultimately tragic. It will touch upon the artistic discoveries, challenges and surprises we faced along the way and how those impacted on the final text and production. We will reflect on whether we have managed to create a truly ‘universal’ piece in the context of The Claim.

To conclude the workshop, we will draw upon the work of practitioners adapting canonical tragedies, to extend our thinking on whether we can truly talk about a ‘universal’ text and what it means to try to adapt, to reach across cultural assumptions and how we come up against the same questions of an audience’s capacities to get, understand, reference. We will also touch upon notions of decolonizing text and how the very notion of an assumed ‘us’ is at play in many theatre texts, which forms part of the problem.