For my Coursework I studied 'Bouncers - 1990s Remix' by John Godber, and 'Shakers-Restirred' by John Godber and Jane Thornton.
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GCSE Drama Coursework
For my Coursework I studied 'Bouncers - 1990s Remix' by John Godber, and 'Shakers-Restirred' by John Godber and Jane Thornton. Originally set in the 1980s but later adapted for the nineties, the plays are often performed together. They tell stories about urban nightlife from the points of view of nightclub bouncers and cocktail waitresses. Each play only involves four actors, and they play all the parts. I enjoyed studying the plays as they use comedy, melodrama and music to portray some very different characters. I also noticed that sometimes, beneath the comic aspects of the play, there were more serious messages about life.
Area of Study 1 - Character and Context
Our play was similar to 'Bouncers' and 'Shakers' as we worked in groups of four too.
Our characters were police officers, as we felt that the police see just as much of the things that go on in nightclubs and bars as Bouncers do. As well as being police officers, we also played all the parts of the smaller characters in the bars and clubs. We took this idea of playing multiple characters from the plays we read.
My main character was a female police officer called Karen Smith. She comes across as a very strong, blunt and confident character, from a rough background, but she hides a secret. When Karen was younger her dad was really violent to her, her mum and her sisters, and it was years before he was finally caught and arrested. It was as a ten year old, seeing her dad taken away, and feeling so relieved, that she decided to be a Police officer when she grew up, so she could help other people.
(See Role on the wall) I wanted to show the hard and soft side of Karen's character, and so I tried really hard to show the reason for her harshness. At one point she speaks directly to the audience about her past; this is when her true character is revealed. The others in my group played the following roles:
Matt - Tom Rivers - a police officer who has only recently joined the force. He is gay, and is worried that people will find out. He tries to seem extra tough.
Sam - Ron Brown - he has been a police officer many years and thinks he knows everything. His wife died a year ago and now all he has is his work.
Anna - Marie Graves - a young policewoman who is very pretty and thinks that the police force is very sexist against women.
The context of our play is that the ...
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Matt - Tom Rivers - a police officer who has only recently joined the force. He is gay, and is worried that people will find out. He tries to seem extra tough.
Sam - Ron Brown - he has been a police officer many years and thinks he knows everything. His wife died a year ago and now all he has is his work.
Anna - Marie Graves - a young policewoman who is very pretty and thinks that the police force is very sexist against women.
The context of our play is that the police officers are working in a busy town on a Friday night. We decided to set our play in quite a rough town so that more interesting things would happen. We set our play in the present as we as devisers could identify with that time, and also our audience could identify with our references and music we used.
Area of study 2 - Structure, shaping and Plot
We tried to take aspects of the plays we studied into consideration as we structured our own play. We decided that we needed to introduce our characters first, and we chose to do this with some music and a poem. Our play was a mixture of several short scenes which were quite funny and over-the-top, and some longer, more serious monologues, when the police tell their inner stories. We wanted to link the scenes together a bit, so tried a few options before deciding on this order:
. Intro - poem/music
2. Police conversation
3. Drunk women outside club
4. Anna's monologue about being a woman in police force
5. Drunk men - leading into pushing and shoving - name-calling
6. Matt's monologue - worried he'll be found out.
7. Old tramps
8. Sam's monologue - old and lonely
9. Big fight
0. My monologue about my past
1. Final scene
The plot was quite easy to come up with as we tried to tell stories about urban nightlife, as a mixture of the funny and the serious. We all made up our own monologues to tell our characters stories. The order of events is not chronological, but quite random and abstract. We intended not to tell a straight forward story, not to give a general overview of modern nightlife.
Area of Study 3 -Audience
We thought a lot about who our target audience should be. At first we discussed Theatre-in Education, and how our play could be used to show teenagers the dangers in nightlife if they were not careful. However we felt that a lot of the issues we raised may make our play unsuitable for school students. We decided that the purpose of our play was to entertain an older audience, who would identify with the themes and characters. We also wanted to make serious points about the work of the police, and the problems that could be going on in people's lives that we know nothing about. We wanted the audience to find a lot of the scenes funny, so made our characters over-the top and silly. When we did our monologues we wanted the audience to be shocked by what we said and so we spoke directly to them, and there was no other action on the stage.
Area of Study 4 - Defining performance space.
Because we didn't have much set or scenery, we first considered performing our play in the round. We tried this out but we found that it was difficult to position ourselves correctly on stage. We also tried using a Proscenium stage, but we felt that then the audience seemed too far away. We went with the idea of a studio stage in the end, as it meant that the audience were on the same level as us, and that we were really close to them so they could feel part of the scene. We could interact with them.
Area of Study 5 - Improvisation
We used improvisation a lot in the planning stages of our play. We did spontaneous improvisation on the short, funny scenes, as we already knew the types of things we wanted to happen. Then we polished our improvisations to get them ready for performance. To prepare our monologues we did hot-seating, asking one another questions in role in order to fully understand our characters' pasts.
Area of Study 6 - Genre, Style and Convention
Our play covered a lot of genres, the most obvious being comedy. I would say our play was a dark comedy as a lot of the humour was from subjects that were not nice, like being drunk and sick. We also had aspects of kitchen sink dram, but with a modern twist, as working class people told their stories.
The short scenes were designed to be over-the-top, non naturalistic and in places, melodramatic. The monologues were almost stream of consciousness in style as the characters told their innermost thoughts. The whole play can be seen as a montage of events in a way, showing a whole slice of society.
In my planning I used; role on the wall, brainstorming, storyboarding, and hot-seating, as well as scripting and improvisation. Our play itself used the dramatic conventions of music, role-reversal, monologue, slow-motion and freeze-frame. These helped us make more of an impact on our audience.
Area of Study 7 - Semiotics of drama and Theatre
In our play there were many signs to the audience. When we first appeared on stage we were wearing police officers hats, to be a sign of our profession. When we were drunk girls we wore high heels, when we were drunk boys we wore baseball caps, and as the tramp, Matt wore a raincoat. As we didn't wear full costume (only black clothes) these extra props were all signs that we had changed character. Body language was also a sign during our play. We also used Proxemics; when a character was sat on the chair in the spotlight, the light represented truth. Sitting in the chair was the only place where characters were truly honest; that's why all four monologues happened there.
My role:
In the planning and performing of this play, I think I took on aspects of all four roles: deviser, designer, director and performer. We all devised and planned ideas together. I think Sam and I had most of the original ideas, but the others all helped, and we all came up with our own ideas for monologues. We all had different ideas with regard to designing and I feel that although we succeeded her to some extent, we could have tried harder with our set. We all directed each other and I feel this worked well, but sometimes it might have been easier if just one of us took on that role, as we had a few disagreements. My role as a performer was the main role I played. My intention was to create a range of humours, identifiable and sympathetic characters. I feel I succeeded really well, but if I had had more time I would have developed my main role as Karen even further to be even more realistic.