During the course of producing our play, we used the well-known novel and recently filmed ‘ The Count of Monte Cristo’ to draw influence on certain scenes, which clearly showed up in our final production. The plot of the ‘ Count of Monte Cristo’ is also thematically based upon betrayal, love, greed, envy and revenge. As a young sailor, Edmond Dantes, an honest and humble man whose peaceful life and plans to marry his wife Mercedes are ruined when his supposed best friend, Vernand, betrays him in order to get Mercedes for himself. Edmond is unjustly sentenced to an island prison after being framed by Vernand for high treason and is trapped in a nightmare for thirteen years. This key element is clearly apparent in our piece of drama, as Fernando, a rich and successful man soon to wed his Fiancée Victoria, is betrayed by his two deceitful friends who envy his wealth and is cast away by them to a deserted island. Obviously we have shared and incorporated the same basic ideas and themes in order to create an improvised piece of our own. A similar pattern is followed in the theme of revenge. In the ‘Count of Monte Cristo’ Edmond is aided by an elderly and wise inmate whom he learns from and the two plot to escape from prison but only Edmond succeeds and returns to his mainland execute revenge on those who wronged him, under the title of a mysterious Count of Monte Cristo. We too were able draft the theme of revenge into our play. Fernando is aided by a castaway on the island who helps him survive and teaches him how to fight. Eventually, he escapes back to his homeland alone and executes revenge on his old ‘friends’ using his new skills. This worked effectively in our production and formed the backbone plot to our final improvisation. Both the periods of the ‘Count of Monte Cristo’ and our play is set in the mid seventeenth century so more research had to be done to make our characters realistic.
Another key source that we researched carefully to progress with our island scene was the film, Cast Away. In this movie, a man is cast away to a deserted island where he is forced to learn how to survive for only one reason, his love for his wife. This inspired our play as the only things which Fernando wants to live for when he is on the island is to see his wife again and to execute revenge on his friends who betrayed him. We used the idea of being abandoned alone from home on an island but we incorporated a companion to our main character, Dar’tanion, who had been living on the island for more than seven years. Research into his character’s speech, movement, body language etc was essential as we could not comprehend how somebody would be like after living alone on an island for seven years and therefore looking into movie of ‘Cast Away’ was very useful.
These two sources were our main areas of influence. However we did look into the classic story ‘Robinson Crusoe’ where a civilized man meets a savage and teaches him how to be civilised. In the case of our play, a savage man teaches a civilised man to be more savage and the basic survival skills. We made it a point to show the character development of Fernando in terms of acting and the on stage relationship between the two.
In conclusion, our play was a joint extract of all these sources combined with our own interpretation and improvisation.
