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NEW UNIT: East End Tales

‘East End Tales is a series of nine stories inspired by photos and new articles from local papers in east London. It was written for the Mulberry School for girls in Tower Hamlets’ Half Moon Young People’s Theatre Scriptworks project. The story was developed by a group of Year 10 Bengali girls throughout weeks. It was created through improvisation and written exercises under supervision of Finn Kennedy. The best work was extended and worked on to get the final piece, which was then written in lyrical style by Kennedy.’

Today we looked at East End Tales by Fin Kennady. The play is inspired on the lives of those who live in the east end of London and features nine different stories inspired by news articles and photos from local papers in east London.

After reading through the text and gaining first impressions on the piece, I have many different views on the text. Personally I found it to be very interestingly written. The layout was unique and the writing was also. The stories told were very diverse which can be great to play around with from an acting perspective. I found that what was depicted in the play was far from what I expected the East End to be. It was not your typical 'EastEnders' storyline, but more sensitive. More intricate. More meaningful. Behind the lines was a deeper message. Because of this, I found the first reading of the more darker scenes to be very disturbing and intense. This was great as it really made the image of the events more vivid.

My favourite tale from the nine was tale two, this was because I enjoyed the writing and the description of the woman. Kennady used interesting lines such as 'at night she dreams of rainclouds' to really portray the woman in her truest fashion. I found the tale be quite unique as many of the other tales were events that happen in the east end whereas this was somebody's perspective of a person. Almost like reading a very in depth, personal passport which leads you into an exiting snapshot of the woman's life.                        

At the start of today's session we were asked what was our impressions of the east end. My group had similar views to each other. We all thought the east end was a place with high crime rate, very bold characters and that everybody was quite lower/middle class. Luckily two members of our group were residents of the east end and quickly corrected us on what the area was actually like. The reality was far from what we had envisioned. The reality was that the east end was actually quite a nice place to live and that they enjoyed living there, although some of our views were true. The majority of the stereotypes were incorrect and they were on some occasions, the polar opposite. For example, we all thought that people in the east end sort of all new each other as we thought it is a very tightly knit community. The truth was that not everybody got on and so there was a lot of conflict between people, one of the reasons for such high crime rate. By the end of the session I had widened my view on the east end and had come out of the lesson with a wider knowledge of the area in which we will be depicting.