These are 8 x very different Peace Child scripts from different periods in Peace Child’s history. They are just a handful in the hundreds, possibly thousands, of different versions of the story that have been performed. Some, like the Istanbul script, have the names of the cast children written in – which is what every producer should do to give the children of the cast full ownership of the play they are performing.
Any producer / writer faces the same problems drawing together a complex story and musical score like those involved in Peace Child. The following scripts enable you to see how other Peace Child writers have solved them!
Now it’s your turn!
1. The Original Albert Hall Script (1981) – a copy of the script of the very first Peace Child show with the director’s notes all over it.
2. The Original US Study Guide Script(1983) – the basic Cold War script performed over 10,000 times mainly in the USA between 1983 and 1990. Though now a period piece – as history has moved on massively since it was written, it is still considered by many to be the best Peace Child script: the dialogue in it cuts to the essence of children exposing the insanity of many government defense policies and provides a useful guide to how better Peace Child scripts could be created in the future.
3. The First Soviet-American Tour Script: This is the script of the show that is featured in this video. Another historic piece, it shows you where we got to with only a couple of weeks to rehearse – and a couple of days to translate what we did in Russian into English for the 20 x city US Tour.
4. The Gulf War Peace Child Script (1991) – a script written in response to the war in the Gulf
5. The Istanbul Script (1996) – as performed at the Habitat TWO Conference in Istanbul in June 1995
6. The Peace Child Millennium Script(1999) – as performed at the Hague Appeal for Peace with Peter Ustinov as the Story-teller in July 1999;
7. Kids on Strike (2008): This is the script created under the direction of Rick Staropoli (who also played the US President) – by the Children of Rochester, New York. It was performed there and at the World Youth Congress in Quebec City, Canada. It was their idea to have a global kids strike – the idea that now forms the backbone of every new Peace Child show.
8. Peace Child 2050 – Creating the Future we want (2013) – performed in the Grande Salle at the UN Office in Geneva for the 21st Anniversary of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Green Cross organisation. This was the first Peace Child to focus almost exclusively on Climate Change and sustainability issues;