The name of the character that caused this pain to Delilah is Bradley. Bradley an exotic dancing club owner with a love for abusing women emotionally and physically. We chose this character as we felt it was a comparison with the philandering husband of Chicago. With the arrogance of David Bentley portrayed in an eyewitness article from the shooting we felt we could develop this character well. To help us develop the character of Bradley we researched the story of Ruth Ellis using the Internet and textbooks.
While we told the story of Delilah we used techniques inspired by “Stones In Their Pockets” by Marie Jones. In this play the use only two actors but they play a total of more than six characters. They do this successfully by changing voices, body movement and characteristics. This was essential to our piece as we had only three people in our group. We tried to swiftly and quickly transform into different characters to make the piece more interesting to watch. We tried to transform into complete opposite characters to enhance the fact that we had changed. In one scene I played three characters, the narrator, Delilah and an egotistical immature man named Dave to contrast with Delilah.
Our stage was simple and straight forward, we felt this would contrast with the complex story of Delilah. We also decided to keep the stage simple so that the audience could use imagination, as well as us using physicality to show other parts of stage, such as doors and sofas. We got this idea from past work in Year Ten. Especially “Woman In Black” By Susan Hill (adapted by Stephen Malatratt). When we studied this in the past we found it essential to convey a dog on stage, which wasn’t actually there. This was essential for the scene and play to be believable.
Our First scene was a freeze frame, with our powerful narrator giving a outline of the story ahead. In it we had the young and old Delilah. We tried to express how she changed with our physicality contrasting each other. Eloise who played the older Delilah, (inspired by Ruth Ellis) was holding a gun, on a chair (to show status). While I the younger Delilah was sat on the floor in a child like way. We felt this scene summarised the whole story well but didn’t give too much information away.
From The freeze frame the narrator sharply hit the older Delilah’s hand, this was how we changed swiftly to the next scene. Perry who had previously been the narrator turned into a pushy mother, this added a humorous tone to the scene. Although we wanted the light-hearted character of Perry we still tried to keep the significance of Delilah being pushed in to the world of dance.
With the use of narration we showed that scene three was set ten years on. This scene was where the drama evolved. Delilah made her worst mistake in this scene of visiting an exotic dancing club for a job. Roxie Heart of “Chicago” inspired this scene. We used Chicago because we thought it was a strong cultural musical.
The fourth scene saw Eloise and I acting as male characters, we pondered on the type of men that would visit strip clubs and we stereotyped a chauvinistic, bigoted type of man. We then decided that David Bentley was the type of man to visit one, this balanced well with the previous scene. When we first practiced this scene I struggled to express that I was a man, Eloise and I decided to sit outside and observe males in our school. We noticed there posture was somewhat more slouched, there movement seemed more rigid, we experimented with voices and decided low ones were most appropriate. I felt we played our characters well as we explored exaggerated typical male actions.
In scene five we explored how some one like Delilah would fall in love with anyone that would show her kindness. As she had always felt pressured to do things in the past, this felt to her like it was solely her decision to love Bradley. Ruth Ellis had been a victim of domestic violence. We saw it necessary to take small points from Ruth’s tale and incorporate them into this scene to convey our historical references. Bentley punched Ellis during a fight and this was the cause of her miscarriage. We decided to integrate this into our piece. Bradley punched Delilah having the same consequences. This was perhaps the most serious of all our scenes.
The last scene was of a comical nature. In this scene Delilah killed Bradley, Twinkle and finally herself. Even though this was a dramatic twist to the story, the way in which it was presented worked well. We observed Melodrama, and finally decided on the idea of presenting this piece as an over the top American Soap!
I am very pleased with how our drama piece went although the last scene I would alter to use stage more effectively. We were pleased to be asked to present our piece on a school drama night. I believe my group has developed as we have learnt how to overcome difficulties as a group. I hope that our next devised piece Is as successful.
