‘Do we blame superstition or class?’
The narrator also draws attention to superstition throughout the play, for example:
‘There’s shoes upon the table an’ a joker in the pack,
The salts been spilled and a looking glass cracked,
There’s one lone magpie overhead.’
One original piece of role play I performed was when both Miss Lyons and Miss Johnstone announced they were pregnant. Both scenes were very different from each other as they got different reactions depending on where the announcement was.
For Miss Lyons’s dinner party the characters had to be posh and very precise on what they were saying. After Miss Lyons told the party her news and they acted pleased as they knew they had been trying for a number of years but they also had their doubts.
We used thought tracking in our performance to show what people really thought of Miss Lyons being pregnancy and if they really did believe she was. As a result of this we got a lot of mixed messages, some did believe the pregnancy but some was a bit weary. We also used narrating to tell the story and we also used the narrator as the devil. We used the narrator as the devil to let the audition and Miss Lyons know the truth that she wasn’t pregnant and that he knew that it was actually Miss Johnstones baby she was going to bring up as her own.
I think we all did well especially Jade as I believe she had the hardest job as she had to act like nothing was wrong even though she could see the devil walking around.
For Miss Johnstones announcement she was drunk and in the pub. We decided to do the scene like this as we wanted to show that Miss Johnstone was depressed and didn’t really want to have anymore children. The announcement didn’t go as well as Miss Lyons’s did as the neighbors knew that Miss Johnstones children were trouble makes and that she couldn’t keep control of them.
We used thought track to show what the other people in the pub thought of Miss Johnstone being pregnant again. All the thought tracks were all against Miss Johnstones pregnancy saying they couldn’t handle another brat on the streets causing trouble.
Miss Johnstone
Trouble making children – ‘either you keep them in order, missis, or it’ll
be the courts for you or worse, won’t it?’
Hated by people that Kind – ‘God help the
live nearby – girls when you start
‘Praise the lord, he dancing.’
has delivered us at
last’