I looked for articles on the Internet about mothers who have lost their daughters as part of my presentation. I also played a clip from ‘Buffy the vampire slayer’ showing this issue. I found many articles about this subject and they helped me to understand the emotions and anxieties of mothers who have lost their daughters. I think it did support our piece because by giving it more realistic feelings and emotions felt by mothers.
Our piece was set in the modern day and ‘Kindertransport’ was set in the 1930s and modern day. Both pieces were about having to give your daughters away for various reasons.
In ‘Kindertransport’, due to the historical background, the mother had to give her child away for its own safety because it was the time of the Holocaust. In our piece the mother had to give her daughter away because of her age and her parents. But in both pieces both mothers come back for their daughters and they chose to stay with their adoptive mothers.
The characters in our piece were just general middle class people in modern times dealing with this hard but common issue. The characters in ‘Kindertansport’ were very different, the real mother and daughter are Jewish German citizens trying to escape the Jewish persecutions and the adoptive mother and the daughter’s daughter are just modern day middle class people similar to the characters in our piece. This was shown by accents for the different nationalities. Also the character of the social worker in my own piece was very different to the other characters not being emotionally involved this was shown by an obvious difference between her intonation used and the other characters intonations.
The characters in both pieces adoptive mothers are quite similar they share similar beliefs and mannerisms. They both are very over protective over their daughter and are just looking after the interests of their daughters. The real mothers are very different because of the reasons they had to give their daughters away. Firstly the mother in my own piece just wants to see her daughter for own personal reasons she does seem to care about her daughter’s feelings but does not seem to take them into account. Whereas with the real mother in ‘Kindertransport’ she cares purely for her daughters feelings.
The style of my own piece was straight drama we chose this because the theme of mothers and daughters is an important and serious issue and we found it the most relevant genre. The genre of ‘Kindertransport’ is also straight drama; this makes the pieces very similar. To show our piece was straight drama we tried to use various group performance techniques. We tried to make the audience very ware of the importance of the issue and we tried to make it realistic as possible. We used various sound effects and props like a hoover to make it more effective and realistic.
From my research and performance I have learnt that it is very important to be aware of your audience and when devising a piece make it as realistic as possible. ‘Kindertransport’ was a very good piece and it made me realise as a member of the audience how distressing being adopted and having two mothers for a child is like, this is what I wanted to do with my piece make the audience see the importance of the issue of adoption.
The research done in my group and by myself helped me act out my character better because it made me realise that adoption is a hard issue and made me perform my character with more feeling and understanding. I would have liked to have been more emotional and shown maybe a few more feelings felt by a child finding out she was adopted but I have learnt from this performance and I hope to do better in my next piece.