RED TAPE
RED TAPE
Theatr Adlais and The Wallich
What is ‘Red Tape’?
Red Tape is a verbatim play developed with, by and for service users of The Wallich, people who are experiencing/have experienced homelessness and the knock on effects of that experience. This play was created in Bridgend as part of The Story Project, funded by Arts Council Wales’ Connect and Flourish program.
The title ‘Red Tape’ is itself a quote from one of these interviews where the person being interviewed used red tape as a metaphor for all of the barriers put up that make it so much harder for someone facing homelessness to once again feel in control of their lives. This was a recurring theme in the interviews and workshops and became one of the core topics of the play.
What is Verbatim Theatre?
Verbatim theatre is a form of documentary theatre, in which the text of a script is exclusively made out of real people’s words, generally (or in the case of Red Tape, exclusively) collected by interviewing people living the topic of the play and then transcribed and edited to form a script.
“I always call it red tape, because there’s red tape that gets put up in front of anything. So if they don’t want to deal with anything - Red Tape … I found myself going to Pobol, then I went to the Wallich, then I went to the council, then I went to Pobol, then I went to the Wallich, then I went back to the council, then I went - do you see - I had four months of 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, and like I was trying to keep my spirits up. But after maybe two months, I just literally just went, What’s stopping me from going off the rails?”