Working it out Wednesday

Wednesday 10^th October 2012

 Today had a particular emphasis on stage three, exploration in the stages of developing a devised piece of theatre.

We knew from yesterday that we would have to have quite a few characters or characters that could be multirole so that was our starting point. 

From our research we found out that men are more likely to commit suicide than females, so based on that (and the fact that there were more men in our ensemble) we decided that we wanted to make our protagonist a male.

We decided to call him Alex. I think from here we wanted to make Alex a character played by more than one actor, more for stylistic and storyline development.  T

his was because we knew that we would be splitting our play into chapters due to it being a promenade, a new actor was a way of signalling to the audience that this was a new/different part of Alex’s life but also another side to him, it made him three dimensional and it was also a very Bretchian technique.

 Doing this posed the problem of how the audience would understand that each actor was Alex, so we decided on having an item of clothing eg. Same hat or T-shirt for all actors playing Alex this is also a very conventional thing to do in non-naturalistic plays where the characters are being multiroled.

As for the character the Narrator, whom I will be playing, it was decided that this role would be there to provide a lead through Alex’s life almost like a ghostly guardian angel that always watches him and knows everything about him.

We obviously needed a girlfriend that caused the heartbreak to Alex, this character was called Chelsea. Alex and Chelsea are the only properly named characters in the play, the other characters are like caption caricatures.

• The other characters where:
• The aspirations
• The Oldman
•  The speaker

These parts where divided up amongst us, all the men except Dannel would be playing Alex, Dannel created The Oldman and wished to play him, he would also be playing one of the aspirations. The entire cast would be playing the aspirations except me; I would remain as the narrator throughout the entirety of play. Zoe would be playing Chelsea and Sinnead would be playing the speaker.

We then began trying to formulate a narrative and structure for the play.  The Aspirations were created for a graduation scene, which showed a future, so we knew that this would be our starting point, we also knew that we needed a break up scene and a scene in which the protagonist attempts to kill himself. So at this point we roughly had three scenes which would be based in the Hexagon theatre, the bench and bridge.  

The nagging question of what we were risking was also addressed today, during a walk through of the location we would using, Kev who would portraying Alex at his most desperate during the attempted suicide; would be standing on the bridge, VERY RISKY we though. Also the style of our performance is risky because we have to maintain our audience attention from each location move but keep them in a particular emotional space and because some of the performance would be based outside the risk of the weather not going plan; thus we had to devise a contingency.