Today we managed to complete my scene. My scene is made up of four mini scenes. We didn't want the piece to be chronological (inspired by Pinter's "Betrayal") and we wanted to combine naturalistic and abstract moments.
1) Harry visits: This is the one scene out of our entire devised piece that almost contains a literal ghost. In our first scene, that we created last lesson, Lewis is on stage during our naturalistic dialogue, but is unnoticed by me, but noticed by Ollie - this turns on the stereotype of a loved one haunting their partner, in this instance, Harry is being haunted by Lewis. Lewis on stage during this scene, serves two purposes: 1) showing the audience that Harry has stolen the letters to Stella from Charles, before Stella knew of them; and 2) shows Harry as being haunted by Charles because Charles is angry with him, and perhaps Harry feels guilty.
2) Charles leaving: For this scene, we wanted a completely naturalistic scene (as we have been abstract in some form with everything else so far), to show that Stella's life has been normal to this point. This scene shows the moment that Charles leaves for war. Lewis and I agreed roughly what we wanted to say in this scene and then decided to improvise the rest of it - this is to make our scene as naturalistic as we possibly good.
3) Telegram arrives: We decided that we would have a split screen for this scene. On one side, Lewis is lying flat on the floor, with his legs together and hands on his belly, to present him as being in a coffin. Meanwhile, I am sitting at my table, drinking when Ollie (with a hat on, so he is not being Harry) walks to centre stage with a yellow piece of paper - a telegram. I take it and sit down at my table and look at it (whilst Ollie has walked off); overcome with emotion, I slam it down and walk to stage left - swapping places with Lewis. Now on the other side of the split, I kneel down (right next to where Lewis was) and pray - this is to present me at his grave side. Meanwhile, Lewis is now ghost-like in my house, and takes off the telegram and photo frame. We decided, whilst doing this scene, that from the start of this scene, there would be a photo frame, with a picture of Stella and Charles in it. When Lewis takes off the telegram, we thought that he could take off this photo frame to show that he is no longer in Stella's life. We didn't want any dialogue in this scene as we wanted to just have the piano playing - we didn't feel dialogue was necessary as it could all be done with our movements. We thought dialogue would take away from the emotion of this scene.
4) Harry and the letters: At the beginning of this scene, I would stand up a photo frame with a picture of Stella and Harry in to show that they are now married. This scene is set forty years after the war. This scene begins with Harry walking in with the post and joining Stella at the table for breakfast. He is awkward and Stella questions why. Harry leaves briefly to return with the letters from Charles that he had stolen. Yet again, we wanted our dialogue to be very naturalistic, so we decided to improvise it again - this actually worked surprisingly well and we were happy with what we had created. The scene ends with me looking at the letters and slamming the photo frame (containing the picture of Stella and Harry) face down on the table, to show that Harry means nothing to me anymore.
What is left... We have now created all of our material for our devised piece. We now need to polish everything, work on our transitions and time our piece.
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