Performance Workshop Lesson 5

In today’s lesson we had more freedom to develop and finalize our scenes for our political performance for this term. We were first given half an hour to practice through what we already have. Unfortunately, we had to spend a lot of time waiting for people in our group to arrive. After about 10 minutes everyone was in but we realized another issue. This issue was the fact we previously devised the first half of our scene but we did it without one of our main characters because he was off for a couple of days. Luckily I printed out a copied of the script that we made so it included Daniel’s lines and stage directions. It was also good that most of the work that we devised the previous week was mostly using the rest of the group so we didn’t have much to worry about when it came to Daniel’s parts. Within 15 minutes we managed to go through everything we had and devised an end to finish on when we performed back to the class. This part was basically when we all praise Alfred Ill (Daniel) by singing his name in harmony.

Time was up and we had to watch back all of our groups to get feedback. When it was our turn to perform we managed to perform everything with pace, good characterisation and a grand selection of Brechtian techniques. People reported back saying that it was really enjoyable to watch, humor being the key to disconnect them with the emotion of the piece. But, a few people didn’t get what the piece was about, which my group seemed very surprised about. Our teacher on the other hand said it was quite clear what the piece was about, but that only stood out to her because she has already read the play. She said that people would gradually understand what the piece is about if we added more moments into our scene. But mostly, the feedback was overall positive. And that made my group extremely happy.

So we decided to develop it a bit more and think of the question we boldly want to highlight and answer. These questions were: Can everything be bought? How has money been used to prevent law restrictions? These were quite important questions because throughout our scene we talk about how Claire wants to buy herself justice. But also, this demand is an element of revenge and dealing because the only way she will give her money to the mayors is by having Alfred Ill (her ex- lover) be killed. Alfred is shown in the scene to buy his own “justice” by bribing Jeremy Kyle and  having Jeremy convince Claire and the audience that he is not the father even though he knows it himself. It just goes to show the many ways of how money is used to get your own way. We thought about having stories to tell the audience which are regular things that happen on a daily basis. My idea is that I will be playing a football manager and one thing is for sure is that I’m perfectly aware of the crimes these footballers commit. It’s just I’m rich so I manage to pay my footballers out of trouble. Then once everyone is done telling their short stories we all ask the audience what they have bought. This should leave a strong effect on them.