Chicken!. Mark Wheeller

      Foreword

      I have worked in Theatre in Education for thirty years, and Chicken! has been a part of that for twenty-eight of them.

      StopWatch Theatre Company was the resident TiE company at Oaklands Community School in Southampton where Mark Wheeller had generously offered us a base in return for our input to the drama curriculum and youth theatre. He had plans for his new road safety play to be performed to local junior schools in the Summer of 1992 and asked us to write and deliver a workshop to accompany the performance.

      The play and workshop were really well received, not just by the schools but by the hordes of Road Safety Officers who were fans of Too Much Punch for Judy and had travelled from across the UK to see it. They were all desperate to see it performed in their schools, and before we knew it we had a seven week tour booked for November and December 1992, plus an invitation to perform at a series of regional conferences which would allow a representative of every local authority in Great Britain to see it. By the end of those conferences we were sold out for a year and Chicken! was firmly established as an exciting new programme in schools across the land.

      This success continued for eighteen years, until sadly austerity drastically reduced the number of local authorities who were able to afford “luxuries” like TiE. Although reduced to a handful, there are still those who believe in the benefits of TiE to affect attitudes and behaviours for the better and continue to support our visits to their schools. I am so grateful to all of them over the years for their support.

      But the play we performed in 1992 had substantial differences to the script you are holding now. And I attribute part of the longevity of the programme to the fact that we have constantly reviewed and revised the script to keep up with both road safety priorities and cultural references.

      The first thing you would notice about the original script is that the central characters were both boys (Chris and Matt) rather than the boy and girl (Chris and Tammy) that we have today. That change, with the knock on impact for doubling in a 2M, 2F cast, was central to the first major rewrite which happened in 1998. We took our thoughts about the need for change to Mark who gamely rewrote the script to make this work, and it made a big change for the better to audience responses straight away.

      Changes in technology have also been referenced over time, both incidental and central to the story. For example the gift of desire from Aunt Ermintrude has cycled through Tamagotchis (ask your parents!) Gameboys, PlayStations, Xboxs, iPods and iPhones. But more important than that, the nature of the threat from the dare was raised with filming on “camera phones” and then ultimately to putting on YouTube.

      More incidental and off the cuff references are always updated from production to production, mentioning current TV shows or pop stars where appropriate. And the success of the programme has been maintained by our willingness to keep it fresh.

      The last significant rewrite in 2018 came in response to the realisation that audiences were suddenly no longer responding well to the good natured banter centred on boys and girls. Innocently conceived lines derived to get humour from a “battle of the sexes” between Chris and Tammy were now seen as contentious slurs, met with gasps rather than laughter. The #MeToo movement and the gender politics of the age were understood by the ten year olds we were performing to, and we acted quickly to rid the script of these outdated ideas.

      At this point I have to credit the hundreds of actors (some of whom went on to direct teams) who have made this production their own over the years, and used their skill and passion to drive the show forward. I always send a new team on the road with the idea that they are the torch bearers for the