Play for today
We never make a drama out of a crisis is one of those advertising slogans which sticks in your mind. It is not a viewpoint everybody shares, however. Indeed, making a drama out of another's crisis is where writer and producer Vanessa Chew excels.
The brains behind the success of mobile theatre Live Wire, Vanessa started the company in 1994.
Hers might sound like a perverse sort of logic, but it is one which is proving so successful in the North-east that its promoters are now taking their message south.
Vanessa is commissioned to write plays about burning issues. She puts on her play at a prearranged location and discussed its impact with the audience once the performance is over.
I went to see Brief Encounters, one of Vanessa's plays about depression. It was put on at Hazelhead Academy as part of the senior students' conference, a four-day induction programme for pupils commencing a new timetable.
I must confess I thought an audience of 16-year-olds would snigger their way through a play about depression. But I was wrong: the young pupils were riveted. Nobody spoke. In fact, scarcely anyone moved during the 25-minute performance.
The play takes the form of a mock TV interview carried out by a stressed-out, over-the-hill actress who was obviously teetering on the brink of depression herself. She conducts a live interview with a father and daughter - the latter is suffering from depression.
Grieving after the recent death of her mother, the girl explains to the TV audience how she was bullied as a child by parents desperate for her to succeed. She says she dropped out of college and had trouble finding work because of her history of depression.
From the back of the hall, you could sense the students identifying with the girl's predicament; seeing how day-to-day stresses can build up into depression; knowing her father had told her more than once to "pull herself together".
Brief Encounters has a positive message, revealing that there are people, such as the young woman in question, who manage to make a complete recovery from depression. The play manages to captivate as well as educate - not an easy combination.
There are now plans to adapt Brief Encounters with the help of the Richmond Fellowship to suit a tour of youth clubs as opposed to schools. To write Brief Encounters, Vanessa spent months talking to people with experience of depression. She was commissioned by doctors at Cornhill Hospital and advised by organisations working with mental illness.
Depression is just one end of a huge spectrum of subjects dear to the large heart of Vanessa Chew. Her other works include: Ooh, my Back Hurts!, a play about back care, Where Did my Dinner Go?, about healthy eating, It's Getting Hotter, about global warming, and Who Says I'm a Windbag, about lung care.
Born and brought up in South Wales, Vanessa is something of a human whirlwind. She and her three children moved to Aberdeen in 1980 with her husband, who works in the oil industry.
"Everything I do is collaborative," Vanessa said from her tastefully decorated bungalow in Newtonhill. "We are there to entertain people, but they are learning at the same time. We are fitting what the client wants to what the audience want."
With the help and expertise of mainstay actors such as Andy Davidson-Lee, Alistair Harvey, Norma Milne and Michelle Bruce, Vanessa sets out to grab people's attention with good drama. The actors need to know their subject to enable them to field questions at the session which follows every performance.
All the plays raise subjects which are not always easy for people to confront. Brief Encounters, for example, raises questions about employing people with a history of mental illness. Who Says I'm a Windbag? Is even more in-your-face. Performed by two personified lungs, Larry and Len, the play tells how lungs can be damaged by a harsh environment, industrial pollution and, of course, heavy smoking. It tells its predominantly young audience that, in the UK, some 450 children start smoking every day. Adults rarely take up smoking. There is also an effective alcohol-awareness drama called Snow Ice and the Seven Shorts, featuring Brainy, Gully, Burpy, Beattie, Cookie, Shiny and Clot, body parts affected by alcohol. It also looks at how relationships are affected by booze. So effective is Snow Ice that Lloyds TSB has just funded Live Wire to take the production into 10 schools in Grampian, Angus and Tayside.
The Symptoms is also a humorous look at booze, featuring the escapades of one Barf Symptom and his cohorts. It is about drink and public behaviour and explores the problems thrown up by drunkenness, such as vandalism, peer pressure and risky situations in which young people sometimes find themselves. The play was commissioned by Health Promotions Aberdeen and funded by the charity Drinkwise. Vanessa hopes to encourage responsible drinking among teenagers.
Live Wire started out at Aberdeen's Satrosphere science centre, where Vanessa was a redcoat. The centre put on Journey to the Bottom of the Sea, an imaginative work taking children from a sandy surface deep down to an abyss. They also put on Yellow Brick Road, a scientific pantomime. This was in the early 90s.
Then Vanessa hit on the idea of a travelling theatre group with a remit to promote science. She discussed the proposal with the director of Satrosphere, Lesley Glasser, and Live wie was born.
"At the time we had nothing," Vanessa recalled. "No actors, no money, no venue, no nothing. We put on a play about global warming in the Bon Accord Centre in 1994.
"I remember children, whose parents were trying to drag them away, insisting on staying to watch.
"What we do is a catchy way of putting across a message which might be generally perceived as difficult to understand. It's about popularising complex subjects."
Vanessa is the first to admit how much she relies on experts to lead the way where scripts are concerned. Her own sacrifices have been considerable and she is emotional about some of Live Wire's success stories - especially when the project helps a young person to turn a corner.
Vanessa recalled a young man who kept having to cancel engagements with Live Wire because of court appearances after a string of offences, some involving weapons.
"I told him that if the court gave him community service he could do it with Live Wire. He phoned his social worker, who phoned me to check what he was doing. A week later, he came in beaming because the court had been so impressed by his activities with the youth theatre that he escaped a custodial sentence."
Another child from an Inverurie youth club, who shall go unnamed, once threw a Malteser at the cast before the play had even started. Afterwards, she took the trouble to seek out the organisers to apologise, saying: "I didn't realise it was going to be so good."
Although based in Aberdeen, Live Wire travels widely and is about to begin working in London's inner-city schools. We are very self-critical," Vanessa said. "We update all the time, and we customise our productions to audiences.
"Of course, these plays are not designed to get you a standard grade. They are a pointer. We provide the vehicle; it is up to the audience to put petrol and oil in the car.
"We are here to provide a service to the community and we're looking forward to our next commission and the next challenge."
Nicola Barry reports in the Press and Journal, Thursday 22 nd June 2000