About this ebook
Written by award-winning playwright Fin Kennedy, and created in parnership with Mulberry School in East London, Stolen Secrets is ideal for performance by schools and youth groups.
It was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2008.
Fin Kennedy
Fin Kennedy is an award-winning playwright of theatre and radio whose plays are regularly produced in the UK and abroad. In 2021 he set up Applied Stories, a digital production company making audio drama and online training. His first play Protection was produced at Soho Theatre in 2003, where he was also Pearson writer-in-residence. His second play How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found won the 38th Arts Council John Whiting Award and has been produced around the world. It has become a firm favourite with student and amateur performance groups and is among Nick Hern Books' most licensed plays. Fin has 20 years' experience writing for teenagers, often through a process of being embedded in an inner-city school or youth theatre. His first two plays for teenagers, Locked In (2006) and We Are Shadows (2008) were produced by Half Moon Young People's Theatre and toured nationally. Life Raft (2015) for Bristol Old Vic Young Company, has been translated into German and French for use in schools across Europe. From 2006-2014 Fin was writer-in-residence at Mulberry School for Girls in east London, for whom he has written seven plays, published in two volumes by Nick Hern Books as The Urban Girl's Guide to Camping and other plays and The Domino Effect and other plays for teenagers. Fin also writes for radio and has had ten Afternoon Plays broadcast on BBC Radio 4 including The Good Listener, a returning series set inside GCHQ and On Kosovo Field, a collaboration with musician PJ Harvey. Fin's most recent venture is the UK's first fully online Playwrighting for Teachers course, to pass on many of the original creative writing exercises he has devised over the years.
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Stolen Secrets - Fin Kennedy
Introduction
When Jill Tuffee, then Head of Expressive Arts at Mulberry School for Girls, first approached me in the foyer of Half Moon Young People’s Theatre in 2004, little did I realise that our conversation would lead onto a creative collaboration that would last for the rest of that decade, and produce six new plays in as many years. I was writer-on-attachment at Half Moon, and Jill’s group had just finished a day working with a short play of mine, B Minor¹. Jill’s offer to come into school to collaborate on something further was both an opportunity and a challenge. I had never written anything specifically for teenagers before (though Half Moon’s use of B Minor was the first step in developing one of my first plays for them, later christened Locked In²).
Mulberry is a comprehensive on the Commercial Road in Tower Hamlets. Due to its catchment area, its student population is made up of ninety-eight per cent Muslim students of Bangladeshi heritage, mostly second or third generation. They are a disarming mix of East and West, traditional and modern – and absolutely the rightful heirs to the rebellious spirit of East London, that has run through each community that has settled there over the centuries. They couldn’t have been more different from me, a white middle-class playwright from Brighton and Winchester. But we got on surprisingly well, they took me into their trust, and were soon overflowing with anecdotes, local news, gossip and revelation – all material that went into our first play together, East End Tales³ (to which Stolen Secrets in this volume owes a debt).
The direct-address storytelling style that I developed for this first group, and which recurs in varying forms in every play in this volume, had several motivations behind it. The first was purely practical; teenagers have busy lives and many demands on their time. If you write individual parts for each of them, when availability issues arise it’s difficult to rehearse. But an indeterminate chorus without specific characters can be delivered as a shared narrative with as many or as few actors as you get that week, the lines simply redistributed among them.
The second reason was so that the plays could be performed almost anywhere, with minimal set or props, and free from naturalistic constraints in depicting ‘reality’. Direct address allows the action to move fluidly through space and time – just a few words and the illusion is created, the scene set. Moreover, such a style solves one of drama’s perennial difficulties