Throughout the time we have been working on our devised plays a number of problems have arisen one of them being that a significant member of our group decided to leave. This caused major problems because we had already written an entire script in which he had many main characters in so we couldn’t use the majority of this script. Fortunately another group in our drama class had also chosen the subject domestic violence for there devised play so we could join together with them and still use some of our old script; however a lot of the script had to be re-written. Another problem that we faced was the lack of rehearsal time. Because some of the people in our group attend different schools we found it difficult to arrange times for all of us to be together at once. This was a problem because if we wanted to rehears a scene that all of us were in, we couldn’t if some people were missing. We worked around this by rehearsing scenes that only a few people were in but this meant that there were some scenes that weren’t rehearsed properly.
When we had chosen a definite subject we then began to collect research about domestic violence. The number of domestic violence victims has risen dramatically in the past few years and the government has been trying to raise awareness throughout Britain and so fortunately for us there was plenty of information around for us to research. While researching domestic violence we found a poem called ‘a new start’ by James A Kisner that fitted in perfectly with the rest of the play. We split the poem into different parts and worked around this. At the begging we had already comprehended that domestic violence would be a very sensitive subject for some people and if we weren’t careful on how we presented it people could get offended, so instead of having a story-line to our play we decided to make it a Varity of scenes and leave it for the audience to question the own views and opinions. The final script seems to be split into two groups because there are barely any scenes where we all work together. This is because a member of out group left and it would have been too difficult for them to have to re-write their script as well.
The other actors and I worked together well. Even though we had a few problems with our play we did not argue about anything and we sat down and discussed the predicaments until we had come to a solution. When rehearsing we got along and worked together to produce the finishing piece. We did have to make quite a few compromises throughout the play. There were was a valuable scene that we were not able to include because the member of the group left. The scene was an extract out of Romeo and Juliet act two scene five. This scene would have provided both historical and cultural references to domestic violence but we could not use it because it would have meant an additional and unfair workload on another member of the group we had just joined.
Health and safety was not really a significant issue for us because we are fortunate enough to be able to work in a clear studio, however there were a number of things that we had to take into account. For instance when moving heavy scenery we always made sure that there were two of us carrying the object because of the weight that could potentially cause back damage. We also took care when performing a fight scene and always remembered to fall properly so not to injure ourselves.
Overall I thought my own performance was good. I maintained a good posture and my breathing and pauses were good throughout my performance. I thought I sustained serious facial expressions and kept tension in my voice when reading the poem. When performing my soliloquy I tried my hardest to become the character but word faltering stopped my flow of concentration. There were a number of things I could improve on in the play. I needed to work on the amount of internal dramatic dialog I was doing in order to really become the character I was playing. The pitch and tone of my voice could have been more varied to change the mood or make the scene more dramatic. Finally I needed to learn my lines perfectly so I could become the character and not have to think about the words I was saying.
In conclusion I think that overall our play was a success. Despite having to face some problems we produced a play that was not only interesting to perform but also to watch. However I do have some accepts of my personal performance to work on in order to improve.
