Performance: Worlds Apart Together

Big Brum Theatre in Education Company presents The End of Reason Part IV: 1918

Worlds Apart Together

A new play by Chris Cooper

Touring to schools in the Autumn term 2018

Winter 1918. The armistice has been signed but conflict dragged on in the Smith household and young Jack didn’t know how things were going to turn out. The war had left Mum to fend for the whole family. Now she’d lost her job in the munitions factory and she was livid. It were like they were trapped and it didn’t feel like victory. Not in the house. Not on the streets neither. Demobbed soldiers on every corner with nothing to do. That’s how they met Harold. He was the first black man Jack had seen in the flesh and Mum took him in as a lodger….

For the men and women who had answered the call to serve King & Country and the British Empire, life would never be the same again. Britain had promised a land fit for heroes but delivered instead a land that was traumatised, shattered, hungry and exhausted by four years of industrialised carnage. It was a violent transformation of society in the Mother country and abroad. No more so than in relations within the family, between men and women, black and white, rulers and ruled.

Worlds Apart Together is a story about the death of an old epoch and the difficult birth of a new age; about ordinary working people, and the struggle to be at home in the world.

Worlds Apart Together is a new Theatre in Education programme for Year 5 & 6 at primary schools, and all years at secondary schools. Combining a new play and participatory learning workshops with your students it explores identity and equality through the experience of ordinary men and women forever changed by the First World War.

For primary pupils, Worlds Apart Together will provide a stimulus for work within the curriculum, helping children develop creative thinking through expertly facilitated enquiry and discussion, empowering pupils to share opinions, explain views and make choices.

For secondary schools students, Worlds Apart Together will have broad curricular appeal in terms of English, Drama, History, RE and PSHE, raising relevant issues and asking profound questions about both World War One and our own troubled times today.

Feedback from Big Brum’s 2016 tour of ‘Over the Top’ included:

“I have rarely seen the children so engaged, for them to be so up close and personal with the actors and the action was brilliant, and all in the safe environment of their own school. They felt privileged that the show was only for them and were thoughtful & respectful in their reflections and questions”

Katy O’Hara, Year 6 teacher, Windmill Primary, Telford

“A fantastic interactive piece about nurses in WW1. Students were really engaged and have talked about it non-stop ever since”

Donna Mitchell, Drama Teacher, Harborne Academy, Birmingham

For more information, contact Matt on 0121 742 6321 or: matt@bigbrum.org.uk