Draft two. Phew.

Now it’s time to hear it read out by some actors and play with some staging ideas before getting it ready for rehearsal and production. With the generous support of the National Theatre Studio, we’ll be doing that in mid-April.

It’s going to be quite an experience for Noah and I to see how the main characters in the play – who are in fact not characters at all, but living, breathing people – are brought to life by the actors. When playing real people and working with their stories, the temptation is often to attempt an impersonation rather than an interpretation. I suspect it will be quite difficult to let go of the image we have of each individual, wanting to make sure they are not misrepresented and also because we want the audience to be as interested in and as inspired by them as we have been throughout the research and writing process.

One of the characters, Zoriah Miller, an American photojournalist who travels the world, painstakingly documenting wars and disasters, is in Haiti at the moment, trying to make sure the world doesn’t move on from that disaster too quickly. I highly recommend subscribing to his blog and keeping up with his incredible work.

We’re looking at an October/November run … with the details tantalisingly close to being announced – so watch this space! In the meantime, we’ll be trying to raise the necessary cash to pay for it all – so anyone who needs to get rid of some before the end of the tax year and who wants to help us tell the stories of seven remarkable journalists, please do let us know!

By Christine Bacon, co-Artistic Director

• Outreach project Actors for Human Rights now has over 500 professional actors as part of our UK network! http://iceandfire.co.uk/outreach #
• I uploaded a YouTube video — Bind – a new play for young people http://youtu.be/xMNDKBk8C1U?a #

• Tune in to tonight's Radio 4 Friday Play to hear the winner of 2008's Protect the Human competition http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qx5rk #
• Getting On, launching March @ Almeida London & Tobacco Factory Bristol, now fully cast! http://iceandfire.co.uk/outreach/scripts/getting-on #
• ‘After the Accident’, which won the Protect the Human playwriting competition 2008, is this week's Friday Play on Radio 4 @ 9:00pm (26 Feb) #
• Holding auditions this week for video campaign with Children's Society. African actresses between 13-21 contact media@iceandfire.co.uk #

• Excited to be performing excerpt from our show The Illegals on Mon @ GLA in front of the Mayor! Hopefully support for an amnesty will grow #
• Asylum Monologues this Fri 19th Feb, 5:30pm @ University of London, followed by Q&A + screening of short film 1000 Voices. Free event! #

There is an ad on television at the moment that really gets my goat. I have a cold shiver every time it’s on. No, it’s not the Go Compare opera man, it’s an ad for skincare that starts with the line “Your skin has 3 fundamental rights…”

Skin doesn’t have rights, and I find the notion offensive. “The right to moisturisation”? Puh-lease!

Although this is just a small, trivial example, I think this ad (I can’t even remember what the product is, so it fails on that level too!) represents a wider problem, where the Human Rights Act, and the broader concept of human rights, is trivialised and misunderstood. A right is different to a want. And rights often come with responsibilities.

Afua Hirsch has an excellent regular column in the Guardian, Human Rights Watch. She also writes, along with Henry Porter, the Liberty Central Blog. In a blog post last week, Hirsch writes:

“… in England, the Human Rights act is unloved. There is a view – largely based on misunderstanding, in my opinion, but I’m a lawyer so I’m told I don’t count that the human rights act is a villain’s charter. It is accused of protecting criminals and thugs, and all the while failing to protect the law-abiding public from more important developments, like the spread of surveillance.”

Hirsch goes on to say that in Northern Ireland and Scotland they have differing approaches and attitudes to the Human Rights Act. In NI especially, perhaps because events that have violated people’s rights and scared the public are so recent, they are pushing for their own Bill of Rights that goes further than the current one, “whether the law should protect the right to housing, work and education – socio-economic rights that are barely even discussed in Great Britain.”

But not only is the Human Rights Act undermined by people claiming that it focuses on protecting “the bad guys”, as Hirsch mentions above, but it is also undermined by people who misuse it – either in name or in practice. The number of times you hear someone claim “But it’s my right to… drink more even though I’m inebriated/talk loudly at the cinema and annoy other patrons/take up two seats on the bus…”.

“It’s a free country.”

Why does the concept of rights and freedom get associated with selfishness and individual wants over and above what society needs? It’s offensive to those people who genuinely don’t have their human rights, who don’t have the freedom to make ridiculous, generalised complaints about “rights infringements”.

Human rights walks the fine line between an individual’s needs and what society requires to function and provide for its citizens. You may have the right to do whatever you want to your own body – like continue drinking even when you’re drunk, for eg – but what if that makes you violent towards someone else? Or you end up in hospital, and taxpayers have to foot the bill? Rights and responsibilities go hand in hand and should not be used and abused for trivial, petty wants.

Skin doesn’t have rights. But we all have a responsibility to challenge the misuse of such an important concept.

By Charlotte George, Media & Communications Officer

• Aged 13-19? Got a talent and something to say about your community? Then follow this link http://www.unicorntheatre.com/venuehire/yic #
• More than 40 plays so far submitted to Everyone Has the Right! Enter now: http://iceandfire.co.uk/participation/everyonehastheright/ #
• Check out our new video about the Children Together movement and play project, http://iceandfire.co.uk/participation/children-together/ #

The tag line for our newest outreach script, Getting On, reads: ‘What does it mean to grow old in Britain today? And what does being ‘old’ mean anyway?’

When talking about such a diverse group of people spanning such a huge age range (over 50 years if we’re starting at the current pensionable age for women, 60, and ending with Britain’s current oldest person at 113, Florence Emily Baldwin) they are actually pretty difficult questions to answer.

In the script I wanted to illustrate the nonsense of lumping together 19% of the population in to one category and the impossibility of covering all the issues that would impact on such a range of people. Knowing that there was no way that I was going to be able to come up with any definitives I created a list of areas that I felt were important to cover. These included: isolation, poverty and age discrimination as well as focussing on a central tenet of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, each human being’s ‘inherent dignity’.

The people I interviewed came from a variety of sources. Age Concern Bristol have been very supportive of the project and have worked closely with me on identifying individuals who would be willing to speak. This led to a very moving interview with a man in his late 60’s, Stanley in the script, who after being attacked on the street went in to a spiral of depression, leading to bankruptcy and imminent homelessness. It was only through Age Concern’s interventions that Stanley feels his life is now full and ‘worth living.’ Our relationship with Age Concern Bristol has led to a special performance of the script at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol on the 14th March.

As well as working with NGOs and campaigning organisations I began to look to the media where I found another interviewee, who featured on the Dispatches programme, Too Old to Work. A fitness instructor with over 30 years experience, Amelia was forced to leave her job without a valid explanation for her dismissal. Together with her husband, Peter, she took her case to appeal, leading to her reinstatement at the fitness centre where she still runs seven sessions a week, aged 71. Before the interview I took part in one of these sessions and was left sweating and red faced after 15 minutes, providing a clear example of Peter’s observation that:

“The people who are much younger than her, wouldn’t be capable of doing anything like what she’d done, these middle aged, overweight, unfit people. It’s a glorious example of the nonsense of ageism.”

What struck me very strongly about the people I interviewed was their sense of self. Yes, they had grown older and although this had had a physical impact on their lives, they were on the whole, the same people they had always been. To categorise them as somehow falling in to the same group, merely because of a vague similarity in age was, at the very least, unhelpful. If we use the same yard stick, people in their early 20s have the same needs/desires/interests as those in their late 50s. I think Elizabeth, a former journalist from West London, sums this up beautifully in the following lines which I believe are at the essence of the script.

“There’s a lot of whitewashing and everybody’s lumped together once you’re a certain age. You almost lose who you are. It’s very important isn’t it that we keep our originality, we keep ourselves as being people.”

By Sara Masters, co-Artistic Director

• Do you have a story to tell? We're collecting testimonies from undocumented migrants & those experiencing poverty in London: 02073775299 #
• Bringing voices of children in immigration detention to STEM launch leicester http://www.sustainedtheatre.org.uk/en/news/region/East%20Midlands #
• Going global! Actors for Human Rights Germany planning for their launch event in Berlin this year http://www.buehne-fuer-menschenrechte.de #
• In London? Asylum Monologues at the Central School of Speech and Drama on Thurs, Studio 1 @ 6:45pm, http://iceandfire.co.uk/coming-up/ #

• Do you have a story to tell? We're collecting testimonies from undocumented migrants & those experiencing poverty in London: 02073775299 #
• Bringing voices of children in immigration detention to STEM launch leicester http://www.sustainedtheatre.org.uk/en/news/region/East%20Midlands #
• Going global! Actors for Human Rights Germany planning for their launch event in Berlin this year http://www.buehne-fuer-menschenrechte.de #
• In London? Asylum Monologues at the Central School of Speech and Drama on Thurs, Studio 1 @ 6:45pm, http://iceandfire.co.uk/coming-up/ #

• Done! First draft of new script telling true stories of growing older in the UK today: http://iceandfire.co.uk/outreach/scripts/getting-on/ #
• Julian Armistead's play After the Accident, which won the Protect the Human competition in 08, is on Radio 4 Feb 26 @ 9pm #
• Palestine Monologues this week in London and in Wales. For more details and performances, go to http://iceandfire.co.uk/coming-up/ #