In my play, I played 2 main characters. The first character was a policeman who I used for my monologue piece. He has a strong British accent and seems very posh. The second character I played was the “Great Tall Tailor” and I came along to cut off the little boys thumbs. This character is a villain and is very sinister and creepy.
These poems were set in the mid 1800’s. In that time period, working class children were forced to work and had no chance to go to school like the middle and upper class children. Working class children had very little, if any, opportunities. Most of the children who went to school were boys. Girls very rarely went to school. They would have governesses instead. The children would play with very simple toys such as abacus’s and dolls.
However, in the present day, every child has the opportunity to go to school, regardless of their class background. Also, boys and girls have equal rights. The toys that children today play with are very different also. Most of them are electronic and expensive.
Our play was quite melodramatic and the style was slightly comic yet sinister. We tried to include a slight atmosphere of suspense and evil as the results in the poem are quite bad. However, to lighten the mood and not make it seem so dark, we tried to make it slightly comic. To create this atmosphere, we used a lot of dimmed lights and never had them on full brightness. We also used a lot of stylised music which is associated with villains such as the music from the shower scene from “Psycho”. We also used a lot of slow movement. In this play, we used several stylised devices including stylised movement, freeze frames and talking to audience. The stylised movement was me doing a very slow, over-exaggerated creepy walk. We did us other devices throughout our play.
In our Mobile Phone piece, it was quite stylised but we tried to tell a serious story. The atmosphere was quite sad as it was telling the story of a train crash. To keep it serious, we didn’t include any jokes or humourous action. The lights were fairly dim most of the time like in our Suck-a-Thumb play. Like in our other ply, we used a lot of stylised devices. We used freeze frames several times and used a movement technique where 2 people each represented trains heading towards each other and crashing.
I think that I performed my roles quite well as I gave all of my performance lots of efforts and energy. I tried my best at the voices and tried to find a voice that suited my characters. I also take care of my positioning on the stage so that the stage looks balanced with the other actors.
I think our finished piece was accepted quite well by our audience but I think that they were a bit bored during our monologues which we later realised need to be more interesting and have more action and movement in them.
