Jonathan Nelson 10O Drama Mr. Lee-Allen
Drama Essay Coursework
Blood Brothers tells the story of twin bothers who are born into a large working class family from Liverpool called the Johnston’s. Due to financial problems and threats from the welfare to take the family into care, Mrs Johnston decides to have one of the twins adopted into the Lyons family, (a rich upper-class family who are unable to have children). The play looks at the differences and conflicts in their upbringings, their relationships to each other and those around them, and their real and adopted mothers.
The essential way we went about working on it was this. We would start off by reading the passage we would be working on at the beginning of the lesson. We would then talk with our teacher about how we should go about performing the piece and what kind of techniques we should use to make our pieces real. We would then go off into our groups and create and practice our scene and then perform it, often using many improvising during the process.
We did a lot of preparatory lessons leading up to our main scene that we would work on. These are the lessons we did:
- Liverpudlian Accent - For this lesson we started off by reading the first 2 chapters of the play. We then as a class discussed what we thought the stereotypical accents would be for each of the two classes of family. The main focus of this task was to teach us how to use the accents in our later lessons and distinguish the two accents from each other.
- Learn Lines – In this lesson we went and practiced lines from the play of a scene in groups of two or three. We then performed our scenes to the rest of the class to the best of our ability trying to remember all the lines we had learned before hand.
- Kids- role-playing in playground – For this lesson we practiced with our teacher in a whole class role-play of how to act as children. We practiced many of the features of children such as very happy and over expressed facial features and body language often doing very childlike and disgusting features that we thought kids would do in and act like.
- Mrs Lyons presents Mr Lyons – For this task we worked in boy/girl pairs that our teacher selected for us. This was a good development as it enabled us to work with people we would never usually work with and see how well we got on with each other, although for some students it was very awkward. For this scene we performed Mrs Lyons presenting the baby that she had received from Mrs Johnston and portraying our views of what we thought Mr Lyons reaction would be. We mainly focused on our body language and trying to perform as naturally and real as possible.
