‘We’re talking away, I don’t know what I’m to say, I’ll say it anyway’ (A-Ha, 1985)

Now we had discovered that the common thread of our theatre company was escapism, we quickly wanted to establish a personal approach to the theme. This was due to the manifesto that we wanted from Fragment but also the fact that we believed the strongest content we could make was the personal kind.

This lead to several exercises in which we wanted to discover every member’s personal experiences with escapism. One was to brainstorm away from an item that represented the thing we escape into, another was to post-it notes a progression of our thoughts. This all eventually led to a group discussion, where we presented our own personal escapes.

                                                                    A typical group discussion on the show. (Nixon, 2017)

This created a list that contained music, nights out, writing, reading, gaming and so many more. As we went through the various forms of escape, the personal aspect came straight out, with each person’s story or reason to escape being shown. This is where the more personal approach to writing the characters came in, the fact that at its core, escapism is a personal and individual thing.

Eventually we shortened this list down to the ones that appeared in the final show, though we always stated that the others would influence us massively. These were Food, Childhood, Writing/Reading and Music, each having a personal impact on a company member and perfectly showing our understanding of escapism.

Works Cited

Nixon, E. (2017) Fragment Theatre Company’s Gallery.