EDINBURGH 2016: BWW Q&A - The Marked

BWW speaks to Theatre Temoin about their 2016 Edinburgh Fringe play THE MARKED.

Tell us about your new show The Marked.

It's about a boy named Jack, who is living on the streets of London and fighting off the daily demons he faces from both his past and present realities. We use mask, puppetry and physical theatre to take you into the vivid, visceral world of Jack's imagination.

What inspired the piece?

In short, homelessness. There's an epidemic in this country at the moment of more and more people finding themselves in situations where sleeping rough seems to be the only option. There's stories here that are not being told enough. But "homelessness" isn't really a plot for a play, is it? Really what we wanted to explore was the individual stories of people who happened to be, among many other things, homeless, and crucially what was happening inside the heads of these individual people, people who had gone through traumatic experiences.

In 2012, we worked in Rwanda with a group of ex-child-combatants turned poets, and witnessed an incredible relationship between poetic, creative, mythological thinking and the ability to bounce back from the darkest of traumas. When we began to work on The Marked, a similar relationship with the poetic and mythical began to surface, where people that we spoke to who had gone through incredible traumas had developed an almost mythical language to speak about the world. That's what we wanted to explore in making this play.

How was The Marked developed?

We ran creative workshops for 18 months with people who had experienced homelessness, and explored individuals' personal mythologies and the role they play in our lives. At the same time we came across a collection of interviews called Myths Over Miami, written by an anthropologist working with Miami street youth. The kids that she interviewed had developed an "urban mythology", an incredible collection of legends and "truths" about how the world worked.

We also had two workshop participants who came on board as script consultants. One, Sarah MacGuire, is a talented poet and helped shape a great deal of the narrative and language. She also named the show. Our other collaborator has asked to remain anonymous, but he provided inspiration for a lot of the spirit of the show, particularly the character of the protagonist, as well a lot of practical detail. These experiences, and the urban myths we uncovered from Miami, started shaping an early version of what The Marked has become today.

Were you surprised by anything you found while researching?

We were surprised by the vivid and eccentric detail of all of these rich mythologies we were learning about and at the same time the deep intelligence of them, the inherent sense they carried and what they said about the lives of the people who experienced them. Take the Myths Over Miami mythology, for example - it was this hybrid belief system that borrowed from urban legend, adult religions, and childish magical thinking to produce a kind of map to make sense of the experiences they were having.

The mythology included stories about how God had to run away from Heaven in a UFO and how this allowed demons to infiltrate Earth and control people to do bad things, and how there were angels fighting to stop them, but the angels would always lose. The children believed when they died they would join the angels in their losing battle. I mean, this is like, Viking stuff. It sounds like Valhalla. But it makes sense when you think about it - everything about these myths was a way of making meaning out of the often harsh experiences in the lives of these street kids.

Who would you recommend your show to?

Well, everyone. I mean, it's an epic adventure story, right? Overcoming your demons (especially if they're so present in your life that they haunt you to the point where you end up on the streets) is an epic, heroic task... It's a helluva ride.

Timings and ticket information for The Marked are available on the edfringe website.

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