Devising (20) - Mine & Rob's scene

Today we spent the first section of this lesson working on my scene. We kept the movement we came up with last lesson as a starting point for this lesson. We thought about who Ollie is - we knew that Lewis was my husband that dies, and Ollie is the new lover, but we weren't sure about the whole telegram thing. We then came up with the idea that he could have been an old friend who I have history with and later end up marrying. We questioned whether these letters would have been stolen or just not delivered. We thought that Ollie could have stolen the letters and only given her the one about his death. We shall come back to the letters later on to decide for definite what we want to do about them. However, we did decide that we would like our piece to be non-linear. We also wanted a straight drama scene.

We thought that we could set up a living room with a table and a couple of chairs. We looked what we had in the cupboard and happened to have a war-time radio prop! We put this on the table and thought that I could pretend to put it on and Rob starts playing the piano for our physical theatre sections, but I turn it off before a straight acting scene. We began trying to write a script. We said that for this scene, I could be alone drinking, when I get a knock at the door - this would be Ollie visiting. I could tell him that Lewis hasn't written (but Ollie knows he has as he has stolen the letter) - meanwhile we could have a split stage where Lewis is in the corner with a spot on him writing letters. Also to show that our piece is set in the war-time, we thought we could start with an air-raid siren. We also didn't want our piece to be linear, so we shall create a variety of short scenes.

Forum Theatre:   We then met with the other group to do some forum theatre. As we haven't created much of my scene, we decided that we would show them the opening of Rob's scene. The first question they raised was who was Rob talking to - the audience or himself? He tried it both ways, but it actually worked really well with him saying it all using strong eye contact with the audience. He said the first line quite conversational but did the whole thing staring at the audience. Another point raised was that people were unsure at the start of the shop scene who was playing Rob. Therefore, at the beginning of this scene, Ollie picks up Rob's book from the table and carries it under his arm as a folder. Lewis shall also do this in the cashpoint scene.