We decided to move the stage directions a little as we found that the position of the critics (at the back of the stage, behind the actors) made it hard for the audience to see them we therefore moved them to the far right half way down the stage this therefore went that the critics were nearer the audience, almost part of it which was the intention of Stoppard.
We then rehearsed the scene with the critics, Mrs Drudge and Simon. I was Simon and after the hot seating I had decided that I was a very nervous character in the scene we were acting it was clear that I was supposed to be the strange man I therefore acted very “sketchy” and nervous. I did this by being very frantic and I had a nervous twitch I also used my eyes to convey a lot of panic when I was not facing Mrs Drudge. The scenes were shown the in the following lesson. A different dynamic to our miniature play was the Moon and Birdboots scenes. This was because of the different use of exposition. Moon and Birdboots’ scene had a much slower pace. We chose to give the scenes a much slower pace when developing the play as it made the play more realistic
The feed back to our scene was very positive they explained that our use of gesture brought the script to life, and interpreted it very astutely. This lesson I learnt a lot about the fun he has with this, Tom Stoppard uses of “exposition”
Birdboot: I mean, it’s a sort of a thriller, isn’t?
Moon: Is it?
Birdboot: That’s what I heard. Who killed thing?--no one will leave the house.
Moon: I suppose so. Underneath.
Birdboot: Underneath?!? It’s a whodunnit man!--Look at it!
(They look at it. The room. The BODY. Silence.)
From the beginning, Stoppard shows the audience his legendary playfulness. Just as in “Hamlet”, we have a play outside a play. The setting certainly shows an audience at a performance of a murder mystery. There will be suspense - is already suspense, as the real audience waits with the role-playing audience, the theatre critics, Bird boot and Moon, for the performance to begin. Yet the audience knows from the opening cliché "no one will leave the house" that this is a spoof, a take-off of one of the murder mysteries favourites. It has all the required ingredients: the isolated house, the stormy weather, the glamorous hostess, the group of middle class guests who cannot escape and one of whom must be the murderer, the mysterious stranger, even the use of the housekeeper, Mrs. Drudge, to provide slabs of hilarious exposition: “Hello, the drawing-room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring?” and later, “It was on such a weekend as this that Lord Muldoon who had lately brought his beautiful bride back to the home of his ancestors, walked out of this house ten years ago, and his body was never found”. Stoppard uses two forms of exposition at the beginning of the play explained above; he is doing this, to establish what the play is going to be about and also to playfully mock play writers of his time. He does this, using Mrs. Drudge: she “uses over exposition” this is when she says a lot of information when it is not relevant, although helps set the scene of the play. This therefore leads the audience to believe the play writer is doing this as he needs to set the scene; this was happening a lot at the time Stoppard wrote this play
In our penultimate assessed sessions topic was “Characterisation, Social and Theatrical Context”. This play has many characters that are very deep such as Birdoot, when playing him it is important to understand that what he says and what he thinks are very different things for example, I believe our teacher decided this would be our topic as it is important to understand every characters character to truly appreciate this play. The social context of this play refers to why he wrote it when he did , it was a parody to books written by Agatha Christie for example and early 30’s and 40’s murder mysteries and I also believe it relates to Cluedo characters.
Firstly we discussed the similarity between the characters from the book and from the game Cluedo. We then used a forum theatre exercise; volunteers took on one of the roles from the play. We hot seated them to improve the groups understanding of the characters. Avneet (one of the members of the group) took up the part Mrs Drudge, the group then asked her questions such as “why do you cycle to work” and “how old are you”. Her answers to these questions helped me a lot as it created a much more three dimensional character and the intricate detail meant I was much more confident in directing her as I knew how she would react two things . We also did this with Birdboot which was interesting as Birdboot is a very paranoid person .It was interesting to see how he reacted to pressure.
After this we were placed in groups of two or three and were asked to create and off text improvisation using any characters from the play. Not scripted in the play but relating to it. This enabled us to get to know the characters and helped us create gestures and actions that they would use, it also enabled us to get used to using the language they used “spifing old chap”.
We created a scene, in this scene Mrs Drudge was cleaning Magnus’s room .When she finds a dead body, we added a comic value, she says “not another one (referring to the dead body) its not in my job description to tidy these away” and throws the bed cover over the body hiding it .Mrs Drudge exits, Felicity then enters and trips over the body, she screams and Cynthia and Mrs Drudge enter. When Cynthia first sees the body she starts to cry and Mrs Drudge pretends she hasn’t seen the body before, we then decided to mark the moment as it was the climax of the scene as the audience still did not no who the body was ,it was Simon. We followed this with a thought in the head, the scene was set up as shown below:
the scene was set up like this as it shows the closer to the body the more the characters care about the dead Simon, Cynthia is devastated so we placed her kneeling down next to the body, Mrs Drudge was worried people were going to find out she had been there and so we placed her on the bed, almost as if she was hiding away from them, disjointed from the scene. We placed felicity away from the body as she was squeamish and also to show she did not really care about the dead Simon. The thought in the head were as follows: Cynthia described how scared and sad she was. Felicity described how she could manipulate this to get her more attention. Mrs Drudge described how she hoped he hadn’t got and any blood marks on her new white sheets.
This helped us to get to know the characters. Using the same type of language also helped as it helped us create a more realistic character. From this we learn that Felicity is very manipulative, Cynthia is very over dramatic but caring and that Mrs Drudge isn’t affected by the sight of a dead body at all, suggesting it is something she is use to. Stoppard has written these different characters into the script as they are very similar stereotypical characters in murder mysterious; the glamorous hostess, the manipulative suspect and the maid that sees everything and anything.
Finally in our last assessed session the topic was “How the action and language create suspense” Before this session we had read up to the death of Simon .As one big group we acted out the scenes leading up to this , we used forum theatre as a way to get ideas from the whole group to create the best scenes possible .We focused on how Stoppard had fun with suspense for example the first scene we used was the scene where Cynthia was handing out drinks, this was an incredibly dull scene. This was deliberately done by Stoppard to contrast with the following scenes. This scene had no climax it was simple Cynthia handing out drinks. As a group we decided to make the characters act very understated and realistically, as this created the effect we believed Stoppard wanted a slow dull scene with no suspense. I also suggested they spoke in a very monotone voice to show that even the characters were bored of what they were doing. The last aspect we used for this scene was to make sure that all the characters still have the same gestures they did in the other scenes simple much less obvious and the pace (tempo) of the scene was slowed right down.
The group then directed the scene in which the body is found, this scene is a complete opposite to the last scene as the whole play has been leading up to this point , thought the play the dead body had been on stage however no one has spotted it . We directed the scene in which the body is found, this scene creates suspense and also humour, and we brought this out by using the following dramatic elements. Pace: the previous scene to this had had a very slow pace therefore we didn’t believe it would be clever to instantly switch the pace to incredibly fast as this would simply confuse the audience, therefore we started the scene with a normal pace and as it went on and became more frantic .We decided the pace should slowly get quicker and quicker until it reached its maximum at the climax of the scene. We did this using action , gestures and tempo , as the scene went on the actions got bigger as did the gestures and the tempo got faster and faster this all create a large amount of momentum .The audience knew it was ‘’leading up to something” this therefore created suspense.
At the beginning of the scene only the audience can see the body .These leads to anticipation and suspense as they know someone will find the body eventually. Later on in the scene we placed the characters like you can see below .This was very humorous as they were practically standing on top of the body and still do know notice it . We created the scene in this way to emphesis how much Stoppard was trying to mock the playwrights of his time; this was how unrealistic they were. This also created suspense as the audience knew the characters were just about to discover the body. Stoppard uses fast pace when something is relevant and interesting and a slow pace when it is not. He uses obvious devises to show suspense as this is what stories such as Agatha Christie do to create suspense and he is mocking them. He also uses the same type of language used in stories such as the ones written by Agatha Christie to show the resemblance. Stoppard is pocking fun at this type of drama he is saying that it is over acted, completely un realistic and poorly written.This murder mysteries is purely comic and is not meant to be scary. When writing this play Stoppards intention was to show the dramatic world what he thought of murder mysteries, and also mock the critics, he definitely did this.