The very end of our performance used candles to represent a life, and the candle was blown out to show that each life was lost. The ending was a pun, because it also meant “blackout”. Blackouts were common in major cities during World War II.
To help me in my work I looked for information on World War II and the Jewish oppression on the internet and in the library. I found a diary written on the internet by a soldier in world war two, which I found very useful and based by role as a soldier on him. I also read two plays, “Blue Remembered Hills” by Dennis Potter and “Greenheart and the Dragon Pollutant” by Cressida Miles. We based our characters of children on the children in the play “Blue Remembered Hills”. This was useful because “Blue Remembered Hills” was also set in World War II.
“Greenheart and the Dragon Pollutant” is a piece of community drama, which involves the audience, also the play was a morality play which means that it has a moral in it and delivers a message (“Greenheart and the Dragon Pollutant” being about pollution). Reading the play helped us understand the impact that community theatre has on the audience, and how it can enhance a performance for the audience, as the audience are a vitally important role in plays based on community theatre, and without the audience the play would not be as effective.
Our piece was set in 1942, as was “Blue Remembered Hills”, however “Greenheart and the Dragon Pollutant” was written wither in the 1950’s or 1960’s. Our piece is similar to “Blue Remembered Hills” because of the scenes involving children and the time period, and our piece was similar to “Greenheart and the Dragon Pollutant” because both plays involve the audience (community theatre). The main difference between our play and “Greenheart and the Dragon Pollutant” is that our characters had names, and the characters in “Greenheart and the Dragon Pollutant” didn’t. It would be more difficult for the audience to feel sympathy for the characters in the other play, and it may be harder for the audience to feel involved with characters that have titles such as “Storyteller” or “Dragon”, because names are a basic introduction to a character. “Greenheart and the Dragon Pollutant” was a morality play, as I mentioned earlier, and our piece didn’t have a moral as such, but it did display oppression and blatant discrimination against certain cultures and ages, and it emphasized the effects of this type of discrimination and how it can destroy a person or a community, by the way people are treated.
The characters who appear in our production are mainly upper-middle class; for example, the Jewish family had a Rabbi within the family, who is a well respected figure within a Jewish community. Within our piece, there was some contrast in the status and class of certain characters, such as the children, and the soldiers. The contrast in status was shown by the way the character with the higher status would talk more confidently and had a more superior tone of voice, For example to younger child being bullied, and the injured soldier being mistreated by the general. In contrast, “Greenheart and the Dragon Pollutant” has ‘fairytale’ characters such as a dragon and no real changes in status were shown, with the exception of ‘Greenheart’ being the hero. In my opinion, the audience don’t really get a chance to become involved with the characters in “Greenheart and the Dragon Pollutant” as they have no names, and are just known by titles, as I discussed earlier.
In our play, we used a number of different cultures, including a Jewish Culture, Fascism and Nazism, a young generation (children) and the rivalry between soldiers. We used many different cultures to describe the war from different people’s eyes. Our characters were distinguishable by different tone of voice and different costume.
We chose to perform in a naturalistic style, with some non-natural techniques so our piece would involve a range of different skills, such as monologues, face outs, thoughts in the head and using poetry and music to create the right atmosphere. This was similar to the style of “Greenheart and the Dragon Pollutant” because that play uses non-natural techniques also, such as the dragon wouldn’t be played with natural gesture on tone of voice. Our piece began very natural, and as it progressed more non-naturalistic techniques were introduced in each scene, such as the beginning scene being completely natural, and the scenes involving children being unnatural and loud, to emphasize the fact that we’re playing children, to the grab the audiences attention.
In conclusion I would like to say that I learnt about how World War II affected individuals, as well an entire community or country, this affected my contribution by making things more realistic and true to real life and history, by historical research, and incorporating facts, and my opinions into drama.
Background Research
Community Theatre is a form of drama which aims to involve its audience actively, trying to blur the boundaries between performers and spectators. Often this has a political purpose - the writers and actors want to win us over to their point of view. In the 1960’s and 1970’s this lead to the rapid growth in small touring companies such as 7:84, Belt and Braces and Monstrous Regiment, who tried to take drama out of theatre buildings and bring it to ‘the people’. “Greenheart and the Dragon Pollutant” does exactly this: taking an important environmental issue and drawing on the old dramatic traditions of the morality play to make its young audience feel involved.
This form of theatre has to be experienced rather than read, but some lively examples of scripts can convey some its flavour – for example Ann Jellicoe: “The Knack” (Methuen, 1961), David Edgar: “The life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby” (Methuen, 1980) and any play by John Godber, but especially “Bouncers” (Methuen, 1980), about life in northern nightclubs.
Cressida Miles wrote “Greenheart and the Dragon Pollutant” as an entry for the Sacred Earth Trust Drama competition. This contest invited writers to produce original dramas on an ecological theme. Cressida Miles’ work was highly commended.
The Holocaust was the Nazis' assault on the Jews between 1933 and 1945. It culminated in what the Nazis called the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe', in which six million Jews were murdered.
'The Jews figured in Nazi ideology as the arch-enemy of the Aryan race...'
The Jews were not the only victims of Nazism. It is estimated that as many as 15 million civilians were killed by this murderous and racist regime, including millions of Slavs and 'asiatics', 200,000 Gypsies and members of various other groups. Thousands of people, including Germans of African descent, were forcibly sterilised.
These programmes are best seen as a series of linked genocides, each having its own history, background, purpose and significance in the Nazi scheme of things. The Holocaust was the biggest of the killing programmes and, in certain important ways, different from the others. The Jews figured in Nazi ideology as the arch-enemy of the 'Aryan race', and were targeted not merely for terror and repression but for complete extinction. The Nazis failed in this aim because they ran out of time, but they pursued it fanatically until their defeat in 1945. The Holocaust led to widespread public awareness of genocide and to modern efforts to prevent it, such as the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide.
Hitler's 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish Question' was the elimination of the Jewish race from the European continent. During the Holocaust six million Jews were murdered.
Hitler once remarked 'If the Jews didn't exist, we would have to invent them'. This is one of his most revealing comments on Nazism. Nothing creates more unity than a common enemy. The hatred of the Jews was the backbone of Hitler's power.
Hitler: 'The struggle between the people and the hatred amongst them is being nurtured by very specific interested parties ...'
This was the first speech that Hitler broadcast live on all German radio stations, and took place only nine months after his take-over as Chancellor of the German Reich. It is a perfect illustration of the way he was able to create a sense of community between himself and his audience.
Hitler was aware that many in this working-class audience were likely to have left-wing sympathies, yet within a minute he had won them over with a reference to his wartime service as a corporal in the trenches.
The chief aim of the speech was to promote rearmament, without regard for international restrictions. Hitler wanted Germany to leave the League of Nations, which opposed rearmament; in November 1933 he organised a national plebiscite, in which Germans were intimidated into agreeing that they too wanted rearmament.
This was obviously going to damage Germany's international position, but Hitler made it clear whom he intended to blame. In the speech at the Siemens Dynamo Works, he never actually mentioned the Jews, but it was quite clear to whom he was referring. It hardly needed the man in the audience to shout it out.
Resources:
“Ten Short Plays” – Various authors/playwrights
“Blue Remembered Hills” – Dennis Potter
