29 March

Back from UK at 12.30 am and in the morning straight into emotional decision time as the group have decided that XXXX should finish from everything. 40 dei. Love Patrol. Everything. I am so sorry. I wouldn’t have voted that way myself but I do understand why they have done this. He was locked up overnight for being drunk and disorderly early in the shoot last year. Then locked up towards the end of the shoot and held for two months on rape charges. Charges dropped eventually but not before the group had had to face endless comments about WSB behaviour from the of course angelic community who never do anything bad. The final straw for the group was probably that, he has been seen by many people drunk in town. But he is so talented and it is very sad. My qualms are that this is a turning point.WSB recruits a lot of at risk people. At what point do we say we can do no more? The rape charge just led to the group receiving so much recrimination, even though he was in the end not guilty. I suppose they feared for their own jobs and felt they too were being accused.

On a brighter note, the new staging looks potentially exciting. In the round , based around three small playing areas connected by walkways.

XXXX came to the house distraught and in tears. Always those mixed feelings; his despair is genuine but sadly  although he could find  reasons for getting drunk he could not see how idiotic a thing it was to do after the recent publicity and  when his job was on the line. He cannot blame himself.

30 March

Jo feels she cannot just write XXXX's part in Love Patrol out with one line ‘Bye bye I’m going fruit picking in NZ’ so we meet with the group to come to a compromise which they accepted with good grace. His story line by the end of series 4 will be at a point where he could be left out of series 5 if there is one. ..or continued if he can get back on track. We ring him to tell him. Hard to tell if he was pleased or not. Good rehearsal on 40 Dei though. Danny will be different from XXXX but he is a good actor and reviving it with a completely different staging gives everyone something new.

31 March

A big general audition as we search for the new XXXX. Another young male actor has also left because he felt too much of  what WSB did workwise was in conflict with his religious beliefs. No comment!!! So quite a talent gap in the young man area to fill.

We had 94, mostly young, men and women come to the audition. All unemployed. By the end of the day we had whittled it down to a shortlist of 19. Initially we were only going to take 3 men for 40 dei but the energy and talent on show meant that we revisited the budget and reduced the part time wages we were gong to pay in order to give more youth the opportunity. Depending on tomorrows audition we can take 7 youth, mostly men as that is where we are short on numbers for 40 dei. One feels a mixture of happiness that one can offer these young people something that they wont find in most jobs open to them and also sadness that so many youth have nothing to do in their lives.

 1 April

As we suspected the promise of the previous day was not totally in place by the end of the second day’s audition. The first day’s pieces we gave them were both short monologues directed out at us and the second piece in particular was a bit of clowning that they all seized on. Today we gave them a more emotionally charged piece to act in pairs and they came over a bit rawer but nonetheless the overall level of the shortlist was higher than many I can recall, even if it seems less likely it contains another XXXX. As if to taunt me with this, I am eating lunch with Mike in the nutrition centre when a clearly hungover, still slightly drunk XXXX comes up to me. We had planned to hold a farewell lunch for him but had run out of time and it had been postponed. He had come to tell me he would come to any lunch Jo or I organized but not one organized by the group. 

The group was gracious enough to agree to Jo’s writing request to keep him in series 4 which gave him a lifeline and now he is spitting on them. He wanted to see Jo so I told him to go to the house but he never appeared. Titus was going to try and find him and prevent him from going on an Easter bender that would seal his fate forever with the group. 

I swing between anger and tears. He is so talented and yet seems lost to us at the moment . I feel responsible as I was the one who first met XXXX as a bouncy out of school 15 year old when he came down to the centre looking for work 7 years ago. He took Jo and I to meet the gang of lads he hung out with and whose antics he feared he was increasingly being drawn towards if he couldn’t find work. I will never forget the night we sat talking to those 20 odd lads about their lives. It was the night that gave us the inspiration for  Solid Sistas, which was XXXX's debut show. For the next 6 and a half years he proved to be one of the most electric actors ever to have worked for the group. Maybe it’s a classic case of fame at a young age leading to ruin. Could we have done more for him? Can we still reach him? Anyone reading this who has  any ideas, please contact me. However much society is frowning on him now, he has given a lot of pleasure through plays and film to a lot of people in this country. He needs our help as much as our censure.

 

 

2010

Sorry I didn’t do very well over the film. As I argued at the time, the actual hours worked on a film meant that very little energy was left for blogging.

So here we are in Feb 2010 and we have plenty to keep us entertained. One of our actors towards the end of filming Love Patrol was arrested on rape charges. This has been a source of great shame and various other emotions for the rest of the group. He has pleaded not guilty and today 17 Feb, on the first day of his trial, it appears that the girl in question has married and is on East Malekula and she doesn’t want to come to the trial. The police are having one last go at persuading her to come or if she doesn’t, the case will be dismissed. Personally I would prefer it if she came and then if he is found not guilty he has at least proved it in court. Her absence will be interpreted one of two ways , either she knows it wasn’t rape and doesn’t want the shame of that coming out in court or she can’t face having to go through it again in public. The police say a lot of cases collapse becasue of no-shows by the girl.On the other hand all the police witnesses have been dismissed by the judge as not very useful. It's his story against hers

Guilty or not, the group is divided; should we have him back? Should we assist him in his legal fees ? They are tired of the public asking them about him or blaming the whole group ‘you say we shouldn’t do this and that but then look at your own actor ' as if somehow we are all responsible.

Whatever, he has a very bad drink problem and we have been warning him forever about where it will lead him. Some feel this is the shock he needs and given that he is such a good actor we must give him another chance; after all he came to us aged 15 with no future and unleashed this amazing talent on the community. Maybe we should have tried to mentor him more through his giddy rise as one of the group's stars.Would it have made any difference? 'Who cares?' says another as we debate the issue for the nth time, 'if he's a rapist I dont want anything to do with him.' Even if he is, will prison do him any good? At least if he goes to prison, the decision is made for us. If he's not guilty some still don't want him back because he's broken our own internal codes so often. Others would take him back for the revival of 40 Dei, some say they want to see evidence he can overcome his drink problem first and will only work with him on Love Patrol 4. Yes oh joy we now have funding for series 4.

For the last 3 weeks we have been working on a new project around the Family Protection Act; this became law over a year ago and is beginning to be implemented. The improvised play explores the role of the new ‘authorised person’ This person will receive training in the provisions of the act and have power to implement temporary Restraining Orders on the spot if s/he feels one partner in a relationship is in danger from violence. For the play the group has devised two story lines around a framework in which first of all we see events through the man’s eyes with a man also taking the part of his wife and then the woman acts her side of the story with a woman playing the part of her husband. Both stories also end with the authorized person being called in. S/he explains the powers and different restraining orders that the AP has and asks the audience to decide which one to use; they range from just telling them to live peacefully together to letting the complainant go and live with her family for 14 days or asking the defendant to leave the house for a similar amount of time. In both cases the defendant is not allowed to go near the complainant. When the audience has decided what measure to use, the AP goes back to the complainant and asks if she’s happy with that; when s/he is, then the AP serves the order on the defendant who sometimes objects and then we see the consequences played out in the relationship through a number of role plays. The first program was this morning and it went well. The audience seemed very keen to see how their recommendations played out. Hopefully as the actors gain confidence they could actually ask the audience to serve the orders. One thing that is lacking is a role play after the end of the order suggesting that the defendant has actually learnt something from it and refrains from violence. Not a picture of perfect bliss but perhaps a violent free one. We have much fun with his objections to the order and attempts to subvert it (ie sending messages through family members) but we need to end it positively!

The whole program is rounded off with some further discussion about whether the act is simply encouraging divorce ( a popularly held belief). There's also the issue of the permissability of 'smacking' your children as the act also covers kids...good Daily Mail territory. This was one of the reasons the president cited in initially refusing to sign the bill.

We close with a dramatization of a poem by the late Grace Molisa, one of the founders of the Vanuatu womens movement. The poem takes the list of domestic violence injuries recorded at the hospital over a 6 months period and delivers it verbatim in short lines of verse.