Analyse and justify your ideas for a Theatre in Education performance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream that meets the needs of your target audience
Our unit title is "Theatre in Education" so our primary purpose for our performance is to educate. However, we also have a strong secondary purpose to entertain, as the more entertaining we make our piece, the more engaged our younger audience shall be and so the more they will learn from our piece. As our audience are Year Nine students, we have to ensure that our material is age appropriate, and so not containing any foul language or gestures and nothing too crude. However, as we have an all-male audience, our cast knows how to appeal to their sense of humour (hence why we have incorporated stage combat into our piece). Also to keep them engaged throughout, we shall make our piece relatable to them but also comical, so they want to watch on, rather than feel like they are being taught a valuable lesson. To keep our audience engaged, we shall not do a full Shakespeare play as this would overwhelm though, so we decided that we would cut down the dialogue and make it our own version.
As our audience are Key Stage 3 Drama and English students, we decided to do a Shakespearean play, as Shakespeare is on both the KS3 drama and English curriculum. We wanted to give the students the opportunity to see Shakespeare performed live because Shakespeare's work was supposed to be performed and not read - the chance to see it performed is more entertaining than reading it in a classroom for the first time. We also wanted our piece to rid our audience of pre-conceptions of Shakespeare being hard and boring; therefore, we knew that we wanted to do a comedy piece because we would be able to make it more entertaining as it wouldn't feel too serious and like a lesson. We decided on "A Midsummer Night's Dream" because it would work best for our cast, we all like the play and think our audience would enjoy this the most.
To educate the English students (and the drama students), we want to make the language seem accessible to them. To do this we have cut down the massive monologues so they are not overwhelmed with what feels like a foreign language to them. Moreover, the language we do use has to be spoken convincingly as our characters - we want the language to come across as naturally so it is more understandable (apart from as our upper-class characters, as for these we are going rather melodramatic and very posh to almost poke fun at how people expect Shakespeare to be performed, which also creates a contrast to how we do perform it). We want to show our whole audience how you can adapt things and be more creative with a given text - so we have formed our own original characterisations of these characters - the fairies are all very common, the lovers are most like ourselves, the mechanicals are all different and just comical, whilst the other characters are very upper class. Whilst developing our performance, we have been very conscious of our facial expressions, body language and character interactions, as these are three key techniques that the drama students in our audience have been working on before picking drama as a GCSE. Also in our developing process, we have all stretched and pushed ourselves (as we had never done a Shakespeare play before and multi-rolled to such an extent) to show the drama students in our audience what can be achieved if you push yourself and don't hold back.
I have researched three different Theatre in Education companies, to give me a better understanding of what it is and what we could do to improve our piece. I researched "Big Brum", "Rubbish Shakespeare" and "Guildford Shakespeare Company". Big Brum's work is normally aimed at infant and primary school children - all their work is adapted so it is their own version and is suitable for their audience. I liked the idea of making it your own version - obviously we wanted to adapt it so it works best for our audience, but I liked the idea of ours being our own, though I was always conscious so we didn't draw too far away from the original as our audience contains English students who we didn't want to confuse! For example, we did consider changing the setting of our play but decided against it as to keep it true to the original - instead we just experimented with our characterisations. The Rubbish Shakespeare company also adapt their own versions, but they also combine the original text with "modern contemporary language" to make their version more relatable. In our circumstance, I disagree with changing the language, as we are wanting to perform a true Shakespeare piece to educate our audience who will be studying Shakespeare - however, I thought making the piece was essential to their engagement, thus inspiring the idea of making the lovers similar to them. The Guildford Shakespeare Company is also a site-specific company. Their aim is to make Shakespeare accessible to those who normally wouldn't get the opportunity to see it performed. I liked how this company make their theatre immersive, performing in close proximity to the audience - I thought that this was something we could do too - however, we have to be aware of the health and safety implications with this.
When working in close proximity to the audience we have to ensure that we do not have any physical theatre sections which could result in us landing or stepping on any audience members (as they will be sitting on the floor). We will have to put tape down and ask them to stay behind the tape at all times - if our audience were younger we would have not used such a close proximity and the physical theatre sections would not have any risk to them at all. However, as our audience is older, we are able to do these larger physical sections (i.e. the fights) but we have choreographed it so that these sections are the same every time in the space. We are using lighting throughout our performance so to reduce the risk of tripping hazards when our audience enters the room, we shall have to tape down all cables. We shall position the lights so that the audience won't be looking in to them. If we were using flashing lights / strobes then we would have to give warnings and ensure that the strobe doesn't last for more than ten seconds. However, we don't need to worry about this as we don't use any flashing lights - our lighting is only used to show times of day, characters, location and to aid scene transitions. If we were a proper TIE company then we would all have to be police checked, however, as we are students, and there will be teachers in the room, we do not have to worry about this.
We wanted to keep our set, props and costumes simplistic as to not overwhelm or distract our audience. We went through all the possible options for costumes, but we decided on wearing all blacks with representational props for each character. Not only are we not over-complicating it for our audience, but this is a lot more practical for us because it allows us to move easily and change quickly for all of our multi-rolling. We were careful with our choice of additional representational props as we didn't want to include fashion trends as we were aiming to make our piece timeless. We didn't want any set as we didn't think this was necessary - almost the entirety of the play takes place in the woods, and the characters even mention that they are in the woods, so we didn't think any set was necessary. Moreover, including set would minimise the stage space available for us, as we have already lost performance space due to bringing the curtains out further in to the room (on all three sides) to form wings for entrances, exits and costume changes. Our play will include a lot of props for the mechanical scenes to create a busy and chaotic atmosphere and to also for comedic reasons - as they all try on costumes and mess around with the props. Apart from the mechanical scenes, we won't use props to not over-complicate the piece. Although we want our piece to be entertaining, we don't want to lose our primary purpose of education, so we need to make sure that nothing distracts from the story line, characters and language.
