‘Paths’ is written to be read by individuals, but ‘Mystery of Dead Young Female’ is developed for a performance piece and to get everyone involved, it is better if ‘Paths’ is read alone because only you can feel something that no one else can feel, whereas if it is read to other people, everyone gets involved together and have the same feeling in ‘Mystery of Dead Young Female’ but when you read it together it creates a performance for them.
‘Paths’ is a story that tells us about an eleven year old boy who takes a new way home for the first time, which he knows he shouldn’t really but thinks it will be an adventure but instead of having an adventure it turns out to be an mysterious adventure in which he characters from different historic times. At the end, we may ask, did it really happen or as it all an imagination? John Christopher puts it in a good way because he does not say it is up too us to choose how it ends which makes people think, on how they want it to end. This is effective because whatever he wanted the audience to decide, they probably decided because of the way he wrote it, which probably help made the decision.
The story that we evolved for ‘Mystery of Dead Young Female’ is that we show what happens at the end at the beginning of how we found her dead, then it carry’s on from there, it starts with the female on Friday, when she was wandering about, and she is looking for something, she knocks on a couple of houses just looking into people’s home’s not even saying a word or responding to people, she just has a blank face. Then we have the bit were she approaches the Manor House. And then one of the people gave her bread and milk when she came round, because the lady thought she would be hungry as she has seen her everyday. This had happened on the Saturday. When she find’s cottage door’s open she stared and then shook her head and moved on. Soon after that we had developed the still picture that we had at the beginning which was a flash back and we showed what happened and ended it with the still picture we used at the beginning. Our still picture was everyone finding her dead on the ground.
The story ‘Paths’ is told by a narrator, who describes all the actions, words, and the thoughts and feelings of the characters. The way he describes the actions is by saying what they do, and when to stop doing whatever the action for example page 125 “She followed silently…… a couple of meters back.” At the beginning of the second quarter of the page he does, and he does this the whole way through the book. Again with the thoughts and feeling that he gives the characters, he expresses their feelings and tells us every bit about what they are thinking and feeling till the very end, for example on page 123 near the bottom of the page, “He looked at her dress again,……Feeling a bit foolish”, this is how he shows the thoughts and feelings of the characters, by expressing and saying everything about what they are feeling bit by bit.
In the development of ‘Mystery of Dead Young Female’ we did not use a narrator to link the episodes of our story but we did kind of give additional information to the audience. Every time we ended the main scenes we had used the police station as a little scene, to link the main scenes together. In the little scenes we interviewed the villagers every time, apart from the last scene because we finished the mystery, this is how we linked our scenes together. We used the inspector to address the audience directly to reveal his thoughts and feelings, we used thought tracking and this inspector did a monologue, which is done to inform the audience, it is about what he has got so far on this mystery, half way through and we also used the lady who gave food to the young woman and the vicar, who did their own thought tracks about when they had found her and how they wished they could of helped her find what she was looking for because they felt bad because they kind of neglected her.
In ‘Paths’ John Christopher conveys a sense that the characters come form different historic times, by describing what they are wearing and when Arabella and Kevin talk about where in Southleigh he lives and she say there are only these three roads which she knows of, we know that she is from the past because the road that Kevin lives on has been developed, and is not around in her time. And also when Kevin looked at her dress again remember something about Victorian children living near a railway, because she lives near a railway and remembers she has a similar dress that was wore on T.V. probably. This refers to the film of a book ‘The Railway Children’.
In ‘Mystery of Dead Young Female’ we conveyed to the audience that the action of our play was set in the historic past by how we acted, the way we walked and the costume we wore as well the accent and the kind of people we had like the vicar, we used props like saying about the cottages, the use of language, that the Inspector speaks. We found out what characters to use how they would act, like when she came round the cottages and how the vicar would react when he found her. And we also used the article on ‘Mystery of Dead Young Female’, which was given to us by our teacher.
The most effective features in ‘Paths’ were that all the children were the same age but they were from different times, which is really effective because they would be nice to interact with each other but their childhood would be completely different and somehow they might be linked together in this Path effect. And the most effective features in ‘Mystery of Dead Young Female’ were the flashback, where we showed a still picture of the ending at the beginning and then we went through the story step by step, and the thought tracking because it expresses the feelings and emotions, as well as the music we used when the young woman was knocking on cottage doors, this gave a good effect instead of using voice because the music articulated the feelings that we wanted the audience to feel and it tells the story for that scene. The music we used was by Dmitri Shostakovich a Russian person who played classical music; the piece we used is called Symphony No 5 Start of the First Movement.
Overall both of these are similar but are put in different times, they both have some sort of way that they use paths, for example she in ‘Mystery of Dead Young Female’ she follows paths to different house if you think about it and the mystery kind of follows a path whereas ‘Paths’ is were a eleven year old boy finds different people from different times on the path he is on, and the story is told in a similar way, but performed differently, as a book and a play.
