03.03.2020 - Contemporary Theatre Research - Mr Lemon

BRECHT

Our group has been reduced to just Amelie and I.  We have decided to do a Brecht play possibly as we will be able to do a lot of research on the context.  We haven't done any Brecht work as well, so we want to do something new.

MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN
The first play we looked at was Mother Courage and her Children which is about a woman with her three children who try to trade with soldiers to profit off of the war.  All her 3 children die throughout the play due to the war.  We looked through the script to find a place where there is a duologue and found that within pages 64-76, there were a few.

WAITING FOR GODOT
page 36

02.03.20 - Contemporary Theatre Research - Mr Lemon

In our group, we have 3 females and 1 male so I think one of the important things to do is to make sure we can find a play with some contextual background.  We've already found the play Colder Than Here by Laura Wade.

COLDER THAN HERE - Laura Wade

This play works well so far as there are 4 characters, 1 male and 3 females.  This play is a comedy about a woman with bone cancer and her family coming to terms with her death.  There isn't a lot of context to the play to research besides the themes of death.  After some more research, I have discovered that the burial sites in Wade's play are natural after the green burial revolution in Cumbria in the early 1990s.

RIDERS TO THE SEA - John Millington Synge

This is another play we have found with 3 female actors and 1 male actor.  The problem with this is that it was published in 1904 so too early for this unit.

HIS RETURN - Percival Wilde

Yet again, this has 3 female and 1 male actors but published in 1922 so we are unable to do it.

08.02.20 - FEST - Mrs Williams

WARM UP

For our warm up, we played Zip Zap Boing to get our brains working and our bodies moving.  We started very early and a lot of us were very tired so this helped.

NEW STORY LINE

James then introduced a new story line which is closer to our original stimulus, the play Art.  He has replaced the plain white canvas with Meredith.  It starts with three friends from university, like Art, and one of the friends doesn't like Meredith and the other is more of a people pleaser but also wants to keep everyone together.

IMPROVISATION

Louis, Tristan and James tried to improvise a fragmented monologue.  It started off strong and effective but I think it started to go downhill as there was no proper aim for what they wanted to.

FRAGMENTED MONOLOGUES

Louis, Tristan and James went to write their fragmented monologue.  They started with writing their own monologues and then finding places where they link so they could fragment it.  It worked so much more after they did this.  They included some choral speaking which was really effective and I also liked the touch of dialogue when James described something that happened in the past and Louis acted it out.

NEW STORY LINE

There were still some aspects of the story line that we thought needed improving so Amelie, Seth, Silvana and I worked on completing it.

London

• 3 friends - Harry, Fred and David - friends from university
• Harry meets Meredith and they fall in love
• David gets mad and thinks that Meredith has taken Harry away from the friend group
• David and Harry almost get in a fight but Fred calms them down
• David then meets Jane
• Everyone is a happy family again
• Harry proposes to Meredith
• She then suggests moving to Hawaii and Harry thinks it's a great idea
• David and Jane act like they're happy
• Behind Harry and Meredith's backs, they plan to split them up

Brighton

• Meredith's brother, Jeff, his roommate, Charles and Charles' girlfriend Marie
• Charles suggests that they all move in together when they go to London
• They all agree
• Jeff goes house hunting 
• Jeff finds a place but they can't move in for a couple weeks / a month
• Jeff calls his sister Meredith and asks if the three of them could live with her and Harry
• Meredith says yes

London

• Marie gets angry because Jeff and Charles are messy
• Jeff overhears Jane and David plotting to split up Meredith and Harry
• Their plan is to tell Harry that Meredith is cheating on him with Fred
• Jeff tells Meredith that they're plotting something and she doesn't believe him
• Jeff tells Charles and Marie
• Marie then tells Jane that she shouldn't do it and she agrees 
• Jane goes to David and says they shouldn't carry on 
• David says they should break up if she doesn't want to carry on
• They break up
• David tells Harry anyway
• Harry believes Jane and David and Meredith gets annoyed that his friends aren't nice so they break up
• Jeff talks to Fred and tells Fred to talk to Harry whilst Jeff talks to Meredith
• Meredith tells Jeff that Harry thinks that she cheated on him with Fred
• Jeff runs to stop the fight between Harry and Fred
• Jeff says that Fred couldn't have gotten with Meredith because he is gay 
• Fred says he isn't gay and Jeff is confused
• Harry and Meredith understand the misunderstanding
• They get back together
• Jane and Marie are best friends
• All is good