"Dr Faustus" - Marlowe (4) (Clowning Continued)

In this lesson we continued with and completed our Charlie Chaplin inspired silent scene. Instead of doing a little bit of work on the scene and performing it to the rest of the class, we decided to work at the scene and involve everyone. We worked out what characters we wanted to include and who would play what role:

• RHIANNON = the person who tries to get away from the ticket warden as they didn't buy a ticket
• OLIVER = the ticket warden
• ROBERT = the creepy person who will sit next to you despite being plenty of other seats available
• LORNA = an older lady who looks down her nose at everyone. Tries to read a book
• LEWIS = the person who falls asleep (and falls asleep on the old snobbish lady!)
• JAMES = the person who always talks loudly on their phone
• CHARLIE = the drunk person

We began by setting up the chairs in the formation to represent our train. We then discussed an order for our partnered scenes (to ensure that only one section went on at a time, to ensure that the attention wasn't taken away from the section in focus). We decided who would begin on the train and who would be getting on the train. We decided we wanted music during our piece, so we were not performing in total silence and to give a sense of movement to the piece (as well as keeping our piece in style with the old-fashioned silent plays). We had a different piece of piano music for each little scene (this was to show that there was a change in situation and characters). We tried to include repetition in our piece (as this was a typical convention of the silent era) as well as making our characters quite over-the-top.

What went well with our piece:
-- We included repetition (e.g. with the constant changing of seats)
-- The music helped create the right atmosphere
-- The layout of the chairs looked like a train
-- Our characters were all very different
-- We kept up our characterisations for the majority of the piece

What could have been better:
-- Our characters could have been more exaggerated
-- Our timing with the music could have been better
-- We should have used our faces more