Top Ten was a project with Acting Out Cardiff at the Sherman Theatre. Acting Out is an alternative, creative education initiative where teenagers learn out of the classroom in a professional theatre environment.

Over a three month period, we were engaged to explore a range of devising approaches and establish a foundation of skills from which material was developed for performance. We were given only the title, Top Ten. We worked with the group to find ways in, drawing from a wide toolkit; theatre games, improvisation, drawing, collage, photography and writing. We settled on the structure of an imaginary computer game in which a player contends with the trials and year ten. Each level engaged the actors as different, sometimes recurring characters and drew content from devising work we had done. The scenes that emerged seemed to merge well with projected images, some custom made and some from a purposefully ambiguous exercise in which participants were given cameras and asked to represent the top ten best and worst from their own lives.

At once raucus, funny and tender, the result was a tale of the player, a young man who does battle, with wit and cunning, with dinner ladies on a rampage, an unfit PE teacher, overwhelming amounts of paperwork, a caretaker with a dark secret, a batty schoolteacher with no secrets at all and others, not only to release a captive dragon held in the depths of the boiler room but to gain freedom for himself and the other students from the confining school rules!