Today I shared my idea of who should be in each scene to avoid complications. Everyone thought this was a good idea and so we took it on board. Robert and Lewis took James to get it up to speed with the farmers scenes. They told him the synopsis of the scenes and focused on one of them (scene three), getting him in the blocking.
Whilst the three of them did that, Rhiannon, Charlie and I went into another room and started altering the "Starvation starts" scene. Our first step was to remove James from the scene, so any lines that were both of ours became just mine. Next we had to script a reason for James's characters absence, and how to bring him back in to the next scene. The reason would be that he has gone to bed because he's got a stomache ache through sheer hunger. To bring him into the next scene, at the end of this one, Charlie will say "Freya! Get your brother, we have work to do". Charlie decided that he wanted to name his fox cubs, we wanted them to begin with an "F" so he chose Freya and Freddie. We also thought that it was essential to script the argument between Mr and Mrs Fox sooner rather than later so Rhiannon and Charlie could keep practicing this scene. The reason for this is that we have to be careful with what we say, not only so it is appropriate for our young audience, but also so it doesn't upset any of them. We wanted to keep the argument light hearted so the children don't get upset and/or so they don't start disliking Mr and Mrs Fox (as we want them to like these two characters but NOT the farmers or the rat).We wanted to include a joke but then decided against it as it wasn't appropriate for their ages. We were going to have Mrs Fox say to Mr Fox "yeah?... well you've got little ears" and he would reply "I'll have you know I have average sized ears". Although we found this amusing, it was probably a good idea not to put this into our children's theatre piece!
As the three of us were scripting the argument, Oliver started scripting some narration for our physical theatre scenes. We agreed as an entire group that physical theatre would be a nice technique to include in this piece. This was because it would be something a bit different from the rest of the piece, creating some variety, and therefore helping our audience stay interested, as they have fairly short concentration spans. The four of us (Oliver, Rhiannon, Charlie and I) decided where in the piece physical theatre would work. We found three places which would be appropriate for purely movement with a bit of narration: "The Shooting", "The Race" and "The Great Feast". I thought to ensure the piece has variety (thus helping with our audience's concentration span) we could use three different types of physical theatre. For "The Shooting" scene, I thought this could be a little bit dance-based (e.g. back bends for Charlie when he dodges the bullets, and rolls for a farmer trying to get to the best position to shoot him). "The Race" scene could be all in slow motion. We could get sweat bands and be putting them on in slow motion and prepare in a sprint-start position whilst Oliver narrates and then the "Chariots of Fire" theme song could play whilst we start the race. For "The Great Feast" scene we could use the Frantic Assembly technique of Round-by-through to represent a busy and manic atmosphere.
