Picture 2: Mike at home making Tom’s dinner before Tom goes to play school.
Picture 3: Shirley at work
Picture 4: Mike is really happy after getting the promotion from his Boss. We then further developed these into structured sequences by making random scenes using our photos that could be in the play. But not doing it in any particular order. We started off with what we thought could be a last scene when the husband and wife have an argument. From there we made what could be a starting scene where everything could be fine and the person first gets a promotion. Using these 2 scenes we thought of how badly the partner would react to hearing the news. Then after this we hot seated the partner who was going to hear the news to see what they thought of it and we developed this into a scene. The techniques we used during all this were hot seating, we used freeze framing, we used image theatre, we used monologues and lastly we used thought-tracking etc…
We then put together a particular order the scenes would go in and developed a full structured role-play. We used this way of developing role-plays for many of the case histories we acted out. This was just an example of one of the case histories we used it for. Our aims when devising our pieces were to capture the audience’s attention on the funny side of sexism and gender over powering but mostly to leave an impact on them on how serious and devastating to a particular individual or family these domestic arrangements can be. I felt the change from comedy to complete seriousness was a very good contrast and I feel it worked.
I would evaluate what we did concerning gender issues as sometimes powerful and inspirational, sometimes brought laughter and was very comedic but regretfully at sometimes silly and a waste of time. We explored many areas concerning this area and how it affects different people in different ways and I think it not only made me more aware but others even more aware. I think we got across our message at first not very well; it gradually got better but by our last performance we got across our message incredibly well and it was clear. The drama techniques we used came across very well. We used monologues in certain situations which were going overboard and this just calmed everything down, it was also a way to contrast on how certain characters truly thought compared to what they actually said. We used split screen quite well as well, this made some of the scenes very entertaining and added a level of comedy. We used freeze frames which were very effective in all of the scene changes and left an impact on every scene. We also used narrating; I found this explained what was going on to the audience better incase they were confused.
If I had more time then my group and I would definitely make the drama pieces we performed a lot sharper and straight to the point. Due o not having enough time we did not fine tune all our scenes after they had been made and some bits which were in could have been gotten rid of the make the piece sharper. Also instead of sticking a lot to the stories we got from the case histories I would have liked to have completely made up my own case history and performed a brand new role-play based on that. I would have also liked to incorporate a lot more different drama techniques into my pieces to make them more powerful and interesting.
My response to the play was that I guessed it was set in a typical middle class house. The three characters are Terry, Rosemary and Lucy. The play centres on Rosemary and Terry's visit to Lucy to see how she is, following a 'phone call' from her worried husband. I was very intrigued after reading the play. It was nothing I expected after reading the first few pages. It sort of took me by surprise, but in the end I thought the play was very good in the way it worked. It managed to combine a comedy into it but also at the same time for the kind of dialogue it had it was quite a serious play; trying to make a very important point. I reckon the reason why Ayckbourn wrote the play was to show the different aspects of how people behave. It was also obviously for entertainment. I researched a bit on the play on the internet. I could not find much but this little bit about the background of Mother figure. It was part of a 5 part series of plays called Confusions. Mother figure had been written the previous year for an entertainment entitled Mixed Blessings. He got his ideas a similar project in the ‘60s entitled Mixed Doubles, which Ayckbourn had also contributed to; this consisted of a number of short pieces on parents and children by a variety of authors. The anthology was apparently performed for a week in Horsham, Sussex, on a pre-West End tour, but was never seen again. Alan took Mother Figure back and began writing another four pieces. The message I think which comes across is how the environment in which people live in can affect them a lot. Also how different people are from each other and what a difference children can make in someone’s life. Lastly how some gender e.g. males think there are certain rules to how men and women should live together. The style of the play is a comedy with a powerful message behind it. Ayckbourn portrays the characters all in very different ways. Lucy: She is portrayed as someone who treats everyone like children, because she is in the house all day looking after her three children. “Nicholas! Stay in your own bed and leave Sarah alone.” She is a homemaker. She doesn't socialise a lot this is probably why she talks to people as children. “Blooming kids honestly.” Lucy says this towards Rosemary and Terry as they leave her house after arguing. This shows Ayckbourn definitely wants to show her immaturely. We can tell that she is isolated in her own home. She is becoming mentally unstable. She is difficult to relate to. “Well, that's all. No more after that.” This is a quote to tell us that she is hard to relate to.
Ayckbourn on the other hand portrays Rosemary as a married woman. She acts like a child when Lucy treats her like one. I can tell this because in the text it says “I like orange juice.” Rosemary is a caring neighbour because she has gone round to tell her about the phone call, but she also asks her how she is. She is also judges people a lot. Because when Terry comes round she says that she is odd. “I want you to meet her … I don't think she's well.” She has a happy marriage but her and Terry argue in front of Lucy. “He just takes anything he wants!” This says that Terry bosses her around and his rules go. She also seems to be shown as a very weak person. Who never stands up for herself especially against Terry. Terry is a worker, who is thinks very sexist like. He says because he is married this means that he works and Rosemary stays at home and runs the house. “Woman stays in the cave, man the hunter goes off roving at will.” He also acts like a child when Lucy treats him as one. “This is my second, it's only my second.” He is very uncaring towards Lucy because she doesn't socialise. He isn’t interested in what's up with Lucy this shows that he is uncaring. “Look, there's a programme I want to watch.” Terry is also rude in front of people “Playing games with some frustrated nutter.” He also seems to bully his way around with Rosemary at times. There is a lot of comedy in the play. Most of it comes from Lucy because as we know she is stuck in the house all day with her three children. These are some funny quotes: “Blooming kids honestly.” She says this after Rosemary and Terry had left just after they had been arguing. As we know Rosemary and Terry are grown adults. “Now there's some very special choccy bics but you mustn't eat them all. I'm going to trust you.” She is again talking to them like they are kids by saying choccy bics. She is talking to them in a childish way. This is not necessary. “Now don't get silly Terry.” This is telling us that she also treats Terry the same way. But he doesn't react as well as Rosemary. He sees it as being made fun of. “If you want to be a little weakling…” Lucy says this to Terry as she as given him a glass of milk. He doesn't normally drink milk. This is funny because of the words Lucy uses, when she says “ Little weakling,” because Terry is an adult and she is talking to him, as he is a child.
As a class we all read the whole play together. We were then split into groups of 3 and given brief extracts from the play to act out. Effectively we should have all had each a different extract from the play. Me and my group got to act out the act from page 10 “Terry: you’re right she’s dd.” The extract ended at page 13 “Terry: Good night.” The basis of this scene is about when Terry has just come round to see what Rosemary is still doing. He then meets Lucy and she tells him to sit down while she gets him something to drink. He sits and starts talking to Rosemary who tells him about Lucy’s weirdness. They then begin to argue. Eventually Terry drinks Rosemary’s orange juice and Lucy comes in treats him like a kid again. So Terry decides to leave. We set up a scene and acted this extract in front of the group. We stuck to the script because that is what we were meant to do. So we did this but added a little bit of our own emotion into it. This was without changing any of the words in the script.
Chairs
Terry
Rosemary
Lucy
Table
Once this was done we were then told to improvise on this little extract and create our own version of the bit we got to act out. We approached this gradually and didn’t just go straight into a play. Fist of to get to the point we did we hot-seated all the characters from the play Terry, Rosemary, and Lucy. The character being hot-seated had to answer as if they were the character they are and act like them, have the same attitude as their character etc… We then were given an option to improvise the bit we were working on or any other bit of the play; we chose our extract because we were already very familiar with it more than any other part of the play. We did this to get ideas of what to do for the improvised role-play. We asked such questions to the characters being hot-seated: What is your name?
Are you married?
How did you get married?
How long have you been married?
What do you think about your marriage?
In the end we had more questions than this. This gave us ideas for what to do. But before we could imply what we thought sir made the whole group do an exercise which incorporated exactly what we wee thinking. It was an exercise using still images, thought tracking and marking the moment. We had to create 3 images of the most important parts in our scene. Some of the images were serious and others not so serious. We did this to get a point across with exaggeration. We then did this and during this sir would point at a group during their picture and the characters from the group would say what they were thinking. This then gave us idea. Our idea was for our improvised play to be about the characters saying what they really thought inside instead of hat was appropriate. So if Rosemary felt inside like dancing on a table; she would do it in our play. Maybe if Rosemary wanted to tell Terry to shut up; she would do it. In our improvised play it starts of with Terry calling Lucy a weirdo behind her back and Rosemary telling him to watch his mouth or she would have to shut it for him. They then argue about who owns the house and who is the man of the house. Lucy comes back just being completely Looney and telling them to do weird things which her kids would do. Terry argues with her and is embarrassed by Rosemary so he grabs Rosemary and calls Lucy a lunatic and they both leave.
The setup for the improvised version was slightly different to the original.
Chairs
Terry
Rosemary
Lucy
Table
We finally got to design and come up with our own play but based on Gender issues. We all got to choose our style of play and what it was going to be about. It was completely up to us. The style of play we chose to use was a Cabaret. Our play’s basic story line was about how Harry, Lucy’s wife returned to their home. A few moments later the family is visited by social workers who are there to take their children. They then try talking their way out of it. Then finally they all came to a compromise; the kids didn’t have to go if they went to stay with the person who called the social workers. This person was Rosemary. The characters we chose to over exaggerate and make fun of in this cabaret were the social workers. I was one of the social workers. We made it so their basic personalities are like robots. We wanted it to be so as the workers are completely evil and just wanted to grab kids from their families. I acted as if I had no emotions and was serious all the time. Bu the message we had behind our play is that social workers are real and it’s not a joke when they come to take your kids away. So do not mistreat your kids and think no one knows about it. At the start of the role-play and during the play, I played the special part of an on screen narrator. His is because this is what happens in Cabarets. I introduced the play and occasionally I stopped the play and commented on what was happening. This was good because incase members in the audience did not understand what was happening I was filling them in on everything pretty much.
Chairs
Social Worker
Rosemary
Social Worker
Harry
Lucy
Narrator
Table
All of these approaches truly made me understand the play. Instead of just having a basic understand for the play on the outside I managed to get a deeper more developed understanding of the meaning of the play. At first I thought it was just a comedy but after all this I can finally realize there is more to the play than that. I realized how all the characters had a unique relationship, but a lot of them failed relationships. Lucy seems to have lost contact with the outer world, “I didn’t get dressed today”, and, “I just wasn’t going anywhere” and also she doesn’t like to answer the phone almost knowing it will be her husband. Also in Mother Figure one more couple is included, Rosemary and Terry. Their relationship is not so great as well, they argue a lot constantly and can never get along. Throughout all of this we used various techniques to get to the point we were now. From simple techniques like reading, discussing what we read to a lot more complicated techniques. We moved on to Hot-seating, Still Images, Thought-tracking, Narrating, Role-play, Forum-theatre, Marking the moment and a technique which I don’t know the name off but will describe. We all sat down in class on chairs in our own space. When sir witched off the light he gave us a scenario to think of and say significant thoughts the person in that scenario would be thinking. When he said go we started. Anyone could say something and at any time. People could also interrupt each other.
We performed Forum-theatre and sir chose a couple of people to act out various scenes he told them. I had to improvise a scene about a husband and his wife getting angry at each other because the wife’s life is so boring. The husband wanted more for the wife. At one point I had to go ballistic at the wife and then leave the room.
We also used image theatre to express various emotions of a family which we made a role-play about. All these techniques were very effective in their own way and helped me to understand the play very well.
Hot-seating- Helped me understand deeper about the character’s personality
Still images- Helped me gradually build up role plays
Thought-tracking- Helped me improvise my role-play
Narrating- Helped me and the audience understand my role-play
Role-play- Put all my ideas together and techniques together and displayed them
Forum-theatre- Helped me work under pressure and come up with ideas quickly when improvising
Marking the moment- Helped me build up my role-plays gradually
The sitting chair technique- Helped me understand other people’s views on certain situations.
I reckon my stagecraft was very good. I made all my sets very lively and made sure they didn’t look simple and boring.
The problems I had to deal with were few. I had to deal with when the teacher wasn’t there for a few lessons. I overcame this by being more independent and trying bold ideas. I had to overcome problems with group members not being there. I overcame this by getting rid of their characters and improvising something without them.
I lastly had to overcome the problem with time. I overcame this by in groups doing more acting than discussing.