Writer Lin Coghlan and director Jim Pope discuss the behind the scenes of Playing ON’s touring production Flock, which platforms authentic realities from the young people behind the care system.
LIN: Firstly, I think the only way you can write a play like this is to go in with no expectations of what the story is going to be.
In fact, I’d worked on the project for a couple of years before the story started to come to me. I’m not care experienced myself, but I grew up in extremely chaotic circumstances and left home while I was still a teenager. I have a lot of empathy for the level of fear that goes with feeling you’re completely on your own without any support structure. Still, that’s not the same as care. I felt it was my job to listen and a great many of the workshops we facilitated were spent just allowing the young people to create characters – because it was clear that a great deal of lived experience was coming through those fictionalised stories.
One thing I’ve never forgotten is how powerless you are as a child or young person. And so often those young people who experience the care system feel that their opinions, needs and feelings get ignored. I wanted to write something that shows what it might be like to have a childhood where you feel like everything in life is ‘done to you’ but no one seems to hear or understand you.
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JIM: Being heard and understood was a key element when devising this production. At Playing ON, we work with partners in the criminal justice system, the mental health sector and the care sector using theatre-making to help people tell stories from their own point of view. It began when we initially created a ten-week programme called Raising the Roof, which arose from a partnership with Leap Confronting Conflict in 2020. They helped us with recruitment and provided staff whom we trained in delivering theatre exercises. Recruitment is always a challenge in a sector, drowning in bureaucracy and our most significant partner to date has been Social Care London run by Colin Taylor, who offer accommodation to care experienced young people across London and Kent. They have an incredible staff team who joined in with our programme. To have them acting in a devised performance alongside the young people they care for was a truly joyous experience.
LIN: Social work is one of the hardest jobs anyone can have. Social workers I know are exhausted, and often worked to collapse. We met many across the project who sacrificed everything for the young people in their care. Yet again and again I heard stories which seemed to defy common sense when it came to the welfare of young people in care. It’s complex of course, and part of that complexity is about staffing and budgets and government priorities, but I was left feeling that there must be, there has to be a better way to care for our young people. Children moved repeatedly when it is against their best interests, siblings separated, successful placements ended for reasons no one can fathom, with such a general sense of loss and despondency for both young people and staff.