All the lessons up until today have been spent individually researching an era of theatre and preparing a presentation. My chosen era was Elizabethan theatre so I researched this (and put all of the information I found on a blog post and on a power point) and presented what I had learned to the class. We all presented our work and made notes on each presentation (on my previous Historical Context blogs).
Since then, we have picked a play from our era and chosen a short scene from it with between four and six characters. We will then direct (and star in it as well if we want) this scene using techniques from that era, but making it appeal to a modern audience. As my era is Elizabethan I typically chose a Shakespearean play. I asked the boys if they would prefer to do a comedy or a tragedy; as I expected they wanted to do a comedy so I chose the play "A comedy of errors" (as it had "comedy" in the title and I liked the idea of "errors" and something going wrong). I read the synopsis of the play and picked a scene that would enable me to use all actors and they would have fairly equal parts and a scene that showed a serious "error". When deciding who would play each role, I kept in mind how women didn't perform main roles so men played women as well as men. I have casted Toby and Ashley as the female roles Adriana and Luciana (as I thought they would be very comical in these roles), Dan as Dromio of Ephesus, Lewis as Dromio of Syracuse and Tom as Antipholus of Syracuse. I am currently deciding how I will make this scene appeal to a modern audience.
Page 1 of 3 - original script
Toby has gone first in directing. His chosen era was Post-war and he picked the play "A view from the bridge". To make it appeal to a modern audience he changed the setting to a council flat in London, and instead of being illegal immigrants the "criminals" were drug dealers. Toby wanted to make us all speak like "chavs" so we decided to change some of our lines to make this easier. The final script consisted of a lot of swear words but it was really realistic as it conveys our character's true emotions. As the script became rather messy due to all of the corrections, I decided that I would re-type the script and also annotate it with useful staging notes. Regarding costumes, Toby told us that he wanted us to wear "chavy" clothing, therefore I wore trainers, white frilly socks, rolled up leggings, a crop top, a choker and a hooded jacket. We ran through the scenes a few times before eventually filming it. The piece had a couple of Brechtian techniques: multi-rolling (Ashley performed the role Second officer and Rudolpho) and breaking the fourth wall (Dan spoke to the audience when he was blaming Tom's character for everything).
