Realism & Naturalism (3) - Meanings & Creating a scene

To begin today's lesson we discussed and learned the differences between realism and naturalism. We discovered the following:

• Realism: Real situations // Real characters // Audience isn't aware they are watching a performance // An example would be social experiments (e.g. to see how the public would react to seeing domestic abuse with a male abusing a female, compared to the female abusing a male)
• Naturalism: Acting // Believable characters and dialogue // Asks the audience to suspend their disbelief

After establishing this, our task was to create a short naturalistic scene. We decided on our characters first. We knew that we wanted to be either 17 or 18, as this would be believable as they are our actual ages. We then decided that we all wanted to know each other from school as to keep the bonds we have between us the same and therefore believable. However, when it came to deciding what we should do our scene about, we began to struggle. We thought we could set it in school (as that is how we all know each other) and be chatting about something (similar to the play "Punk Rock" by Simon Stephens). We said we could have a debate about the EU referendum or discuss the new uniform rules but decided against these as it seemed too much like realism as opposed to naturalism. We realised we needed quite a big and shocking situation but we would react to it in a naturalistic way. We decided on having a dead body in the house. We tried scripting the scene, as we all like working with scripts, but found this really difficult so ended up improvising the scene.


Our setting changed to a living room at one of our homes. We set the situation at a party at the house (as we have all been to a party together and is stereotypical for people our ages) and we found the body on the floor of the living room. When improvising, we just reacted to how we thought we would react if we actually saw a body lying there. On the right is the video of us improvising this scene. We were anxious about improvising (me especially!), but realised that we had to completely commit to it to make it work. Once we got into it, we felt more natural.

What went well:

• We all reacted how we thought we would actually react if we saw a dead body
• When we were speaking, we all overlapped and sometimes didn't finish our sentences
• We reacted in a few different ways (which was accurate as not everybody would react the same) 
• We used the space quite well
• We had a lots of moments of people talking over each other as well as moments of silence

What could have gone better:

• As Ollie and Charlie entered by walking round and through the chairs, Lewis and I had to do the same - which didn't look realistic as Ollie technically called us from inside the house
• My name ended up changing from "Lorna" at the beginning of the scene to "Sandra" by the end, as we didn't actually agree on names!