Today we split into two groups to come up with ideas for our Commedia piece. My group developed the ideas we had the previous lesson with our murder mystery theme by creating a list of scenes we wished to include our piece. We are not sure on the order yet but we know what we wanted for our first and final scene. We wanted to begin our piece with Brighella finding the body and everyone coming in standing round the corpse, pointing and blaming each other (in Gromalot). As everybody wanted to kill Harlequin but didn't, Zanni's "punishment" is therefore not a punishment and is in fact a reward in the form of a promotion! A rough order for the piece is as follows:
- Brighella finding the body
- Flashback to Captain's movements at the time of Harlequin's death
- Flashback to Pantalone & The Doctors movements when Harlequin was killed
- Flashback to Columbina's movements when Harlequin died
- Flashback to Brighella finding Harlequin's body
- Flashback to the Lovers whereabouts at the time of Harlequin's death
- Flashback to Zanni murdering Harlequin
- Zanni's promotion
Whilst we were creating a scene order, the other group came up with a different idea - a court scene. They thought of a "Cluedo" theme, figuring out the suspect, weapon of choice and room. Instead of killing of Harlequin, they decided we would kill Magnifico as nobody is playing this role in our piece and he is a stock character. This also enables all characters to act throughout the piece. They decided to have Pantalone as the Judge as he is the most authoritative and is the character with the highest status. They put the Doctor as the jury as he is also very high up so would be a decision-maker. They put the suspects as Zanni and Brighella: Zanni as he was actually the murderer and Brighella as she has a strong motif. We put Harlequin as a witness as we thought this was a good opportunity for more comedy as Harlequin wouldn't take the situation seriously and would mess around. Il Capitano and Columbina were put as lawyers as we need two characters to be lawyers and we also thought that these two would be very comedic. This is because Columbina would put forward a good case as she is cunning, whilst Il Capitano would try to be clever but actually just looks like a fool. Columbina would be defending Zanni and attacking Brighella, whilst Il Capitano would be defending Brighella and spreading rumours attacking Zanni.
We decided to try and get this Court Room scene up on its feet to see what we actually thought of it. Therefore we lined ourselves up in a suitable order: Lewis in the middle (as he is being Pantalone, the Judge), Ollie next to him (as he is The Doctor / the jury), Robert and I on one side of them both (as I am the suspect and he is my lawyer), Rhiannon and James on the other side of Lewis (as James is the other suspect and Rhiannon is his lawyer), and Charlie sitting with the audience (As he is then called up as a witness). We decided to improvise parts of different characters speaking (in Gromalot) to experiment as see if we thought the piece had potential. However, although certain sections were very comedic (especially James as Zanni) we felt the piece was just far too static and actually quite boring. We couldn't see how we could make the piece more upbeat and entertaining. We walked round as our characters again to get back in to characters to see if this would help us with our improvising, but unfortunately it didn't and we thought the piece was a bit flat. Although we did like the idea of a court case, we preferred our original idea so will go back to it. However, it is good to experiment and try out other ideas to see where they lead.
To end this lesson, we split off into small groups and devised small scenes each. We made the groups logical so we had characters together that would be together - the groups were Ollie (Doctor) & Lewis (Pantalone), James (1st Actor) & Rhiannon (1st Actress), and Robert (Il Capitano), Charlie (Harlequin) and I (Brighella). My groups scene was showing a way to kill Harlequin by accident. We also wanted to show our character relationships and characteristics. Our scene began with Harlequin centre stage moaning (using Gromalot and his body language) about how hungry he is; he then searches for and finds food. Brighella enters and tells Harlequin the jobs he needs to do, only to realise that (yet again) he is eating food he has found in the kitchen. Angered, she has a moan at him, when Il Capitano enters. Il Capitano demands that Brighella needs to do as he says, which obviously angers her a lot as Il Capitano is not a master and just thinks he is. Knowing how much of a coward he is, Brighella threatens Il Capitano and challenges him to a duel (which he accepts reluctantly and is very nervous). Brighella and Harlequin circle each other and Brighella lunges to stab Il Capitano, but he leaps out of the way only to reveal Harlequin behind him (innocently still eating) who is in the wrong place at the wrong time and ends up being stabbed by Brighella. We shall perform our scenes next lesson.
