In this lesson, we worked on my scene. The beginning of our lesson was very discussion based. We were firstly concerned that using a section of a script for a scene may be taking the easy way out, as it were - also when looking for sections of script (as we agreed that we could be clever with it, like how we were originally planning to do Rob's scene with the monologue from "Eight"), we found only section of the "Kindertransport" script. Moreover, we felt that by doing this script, we were heading further away from our stimulus of "ghost stories" and more towards "humanity in crisis" - although we looked at how you can be haunted by things for the other scenes, we felt that we could do something that linked even closer to the idea of ghosts (rather than stories) for our last scene.
Instead of doing a piece inspired by "Kindertransport", we took the idea of war and losing family members. Although we were worried about being cliché by using the idea of ghosts, we felt that this scene would be the ideal opportunity for this. We decided that my character would be an old lady who lived through the war but she lost her husband to it. At first we thought that she could be haunted by things she hadn't done in her past - but realised that this would be drifting away from our stimulus again. An earlier thought was that she could be married to someone she doesn't particularly want to be with, because society wouldn't let her marry the man she wanted to because he was above her - however, we decided against this as it was going away from our stimulus again.
We decided that my character would be an elderly lady who lost her first husband to the war, re-married, but is haunted by him and his love - she is unhappy and thinks about him so much, that he is practically with her all the time (bit like a child and an imaginary friend). We wanted to use music for this piece, but also wanted a lot of it set in the 40's. Therefore, we didn't want to use music from a phone, so instead Rob shall play piano for us for this scene - we thought that this would be in fitting with our time period and could also work as my character being haunted by what she hears. We thought that this would be acceptable for Rob to play piano during this scene, as he had a lot of dialogue for his scene and also has a lot to do in Lewis' scene and two of the motifs too.
As a group, we really struggle with creating strong dialogue. Therefore, we decided that we would work on the physical aspect of this scene to create our story, and then add dialogue to it later. We thought about having dates read out at random points and narration, but realised that Rob's scene was all narration, so we would just work on creating quality dialogue later.
However, we got quite a long way with this scene today. We didn't want it to be completely linear, so we began with me walking forwards (as an elderly lady) with Lew and Ollie already standing at the front. As soon, as I get there, they then turned around and left to opposite sides of the stage. Originally we did a section where I would bend down and place a lily on the floor, as if at my husband's grave and Lewis would put his hand on my shoulder and I would shut my eyes and go to reach his hand with mine, but by the time I get there, he would have moved - I thought we could then have him touch me on the shoulder before leaving to go to war later on in the piece. We liked this idea, but shall include it later. We thought that we should establish the relationship first. So as I arrived and the boys left, I then did a slow turn, but on this turn, I completely altered my physicality to show that I was a lot younger. As I got to facing stage right, I would see Lewis and run up and hug him. This would show him returning from training, but he would then tell me that he was having to leave for war - it was no longer training. I would hold both of his hands and then move towards him, but he would walk past behind me - as if he had moved through me, almost ghost-like. He would then do a slow-mo section to show fighting and would stand with Ollie. Ollie and Lewis would do a turn and swap places - Ollie would then deliver me a telegram.
This was where we got up to this lesson. We might not necessarily do all of that in that order, or we may add bits in between, but we are really happy with the strong start we made on this scene today.
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