To begin this lesson, we discussed our ideas for scenes for dialogue. We thought that the parents talking to the child would be too cheesy, so we scrapped it. We had previously discussed how we were going to make our classroom dialogue less cheesy, but we were unsure on how to make a parent-teacher conversation less cheesy. We then thought of the play "Future Conditional" and how they made conversations interesting. For example, Rob Brydon's character, Crane, is a teacher and he has a conversation with a parent about their child's behaviour. This conversation is done through a phone call, where Brydon leaves the perfect length gaps between his speech parts allowing the audience to imagine exactly what the parent says on the phone. This made us realise that we don't need to use everyone at all times - we could present a conversation with just one person on stage.
We discussed that although our initial ideas in general were quite basic, that using inventive and creative techniques could make a higher standard piece. However, having said this, we have now scrapped our initial idea. We have admitted that we are now coming to a stand-still with our idea and have no inspiration to continue with this idea. We re-visited old notes and found our point that our piece doesn't have to be a story - it could be more concept theatre and be more of a showcase of scenes...
We have now decided that we are going to do a showcase of scenes inspired from the stimulus, with our motifs created last lesson in between each scene. Our scenes would all be different, but our motif would present the end of a scene - it would also make the audience think and perhaps confuse them slightly too. Our ideas for different scenes are as follows:
- School common room - guilt for treating someone in a certain way? - regrets?
- Mental asylum (Motif)
- Dead relative - why did they die? - something we did or didn't do?
- Abortions - a decision that haunts you forever
- In a nightclub - drugs / alcohol
- PTSD - soldiers? - accident? - witness?
- War
The idea of PTSD and being a witness made me think of a monologue from "Eight" that Charlie did in our "realism and naturalism" topic. The monologue that Charlie did is from the play "Eight" by Ella Hickson and is spoken by the character Miles. The monologue is about an American man named Miles who, in London, gives a man ten pence to buy a Mars Bar. It is then revealed that this man was a terrorist who detonated a bomb on a bus during the 7/7 bombings. Everyone died on the bus except for Miles. Miles feels guilty for the event that he didn't die, but everyone else did. His pregnant wife and three year old daughter in America, after him not returning after he was due, were lead to believe that he had died. Meanwhile, he started a new life in Britain. We thought this monologue was very moving - how someone can leave their practically perfect life behind (including their loved ones, allowing to believe they were dead) to start a new elsewhere due to a horrifying event.
We decided that we would like to use parts of this monologue for one of our scenes. This also fits with Artaud's technique of emphasis on spoken text. We are planning on combining Artaud's techniques of emphasis on spoken text and love of lots of movement in the one scene. We are going to make a physical theatre scene based on this monologue. As Lew and I are not in next lesson, due to an exam, Rob and Ollie shall spend next lesson beginning to create this scene. We want to have either Lew or Rob as the main person in this scene (as Ollie is the main focus in the motifs).
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