In groups of two we devised a short on this where it was the next day, and the wife was driving the husband to work. A child came across the road and the car just missed him - it was assumed the child was a boy, although this was never specified. Then we were told to react in a way we thought our character might. Most of the ‘wives’ acted very shocked and then responded in a suitable way to how the husband first reacted. There was an even split, I think, between the husband that was aggressive in some way towards his spouse and the husband that was more sympathetic towards their wife. The result of this exercise was that we learnt the importance of knowing where things are in our set, despite being invisible to the audience, for some (I dare say most) groups completely missed the car - they would walk though the door, and it would even appear to be a bonnet-less vehicle.
Another task we were set was to produce a monologue based on the character we played in the above exercise. We had to confide in a friend about our troubles, but we did not have to mention any particular event. However we did have to mention where the relationship was going, and how our character feels about it now should also come through; not necessarily by what we said, but how we said things and where we said things. We should also take advantage of our facial expressions and body language.
I set my monologue in present times, though perhaps this situation would have been more suited to the 1980s minor strike - when men felt they had to be strong. I believe that this piece of drama would have worked in any time from the 1960s onwards, but maybe not in the same setting.
When watching other performances I again saw the importance of knowing your ground, that is to say people were pretending that a cooker was there, but it seems very small and it appeared to move around a lot. This looked like they did not know what they were doing and almost appeared as if they were improvising on the spot. Also I noticed that some people who talked on the phone seemed to loose the phone the more they talked; some phones managed to change to speakerphone completely by themselves - very impressive.
One particular performance I noticed involved the husband talking on the phone whilst doing something that I guessed was cooking on hobs. Although reasonably effective, I thought that this was very uncharacteristic of most men - talking on the phone that is…
He would often pause, supposedly to let the other person speak, however it did seem as though he was thinking of what his next line was, rather than the imaginary person’s line. However I feel that I was also guilty of this - but as far as I am aware, no body noticed; also I am sure I spoke my words without leaving a proper space between lines for my friend to speak his un-heard lines.
For this particular exercise, I took the role of the stereotypical male - arrogant and selfish. I tried to get across the feeling that my character did not care about his current state of affairs, he believes that relationships are forced upon us - he even goes as far as saying, “my libidos there for a reason - the system sucks, shag ‘em, dump ‘em, that’s what I say.” In the feedback received afterwards one girl said that it was good because I had acted out the stereotypical male’s perspective on life. Before she had even closed her mouth, one boy in the class protested against her opinion, something that I think shows we all need to open our eyes and see the bigger picture; there’s more to life than stereotypes and opinions but we exist only to applaud them.
The Development Phase
My final presentation that my group derived from the poem ‘At 3AM’ was a mime that portrayed a sequence of events leading to the downfall of the couple’s relationship. We began by thinking of the kind of areas that we wanted to go into, involving such places as their first meeting and their wedding, etc. After we had decided on ‘happy’ parts of their lives, we started to imagine what situations the couple may find depressing and ultimately a lonely part of their lives. These involve circumstances such as a fight or their courtroom-set-divorce.
We did take into consideration the fact that marriage may well have been a bad part of their lives - however we did not want to go down this because although it could have been original within the class, we decided that the exact ins and outs would be too complicated to follow for any realistic time frame.
Two possibilities that we had when contemplating our performance were that of props and costume. We agreed that we did not want to make our drama too interesting set-wise, as I thought this would take the audiences attention away from our actions. However, we did think about the effect costume and props can have on the atmosphere and that they have the potential to portray more details of the character’s personality; for example, their current feelings and their past. For the same reasons I chose not to wear any particular costume.
A storyboard of our scene can be found attached.
The Evaluation Phase
Although it was not without its problems - I felt that this piece of drama was very effective; as were the other groups’ performances.
The most important issue that I believe my group must face is the transition between scenes, particularly if using the freeze frame technique. If we were to do this task again, I think that we would note this in our development of the drama; this would mean we could make our final piece more realistic and easy to follow (both of these factors will be very important in our final performance).
Looking back, I feel that that perhaps unconsciously I/we did think about the differences in social class; as in the difference between the egotistical stereotype (apparently working class) man, and the hypercritical aristocratic man. We did not want to portray the latter in our characters for we felt that they may never find themselves in such a situation; although I could be at fault here for following this stereotype (however vague)…
Also, perhaps a character of my stature in society - I am of course talking generally, as we never hear my characters voice - feels the only place he can talk openly about his true thoughts and feelings is a public house (or a similar venue where he is with his friends in a secure, close environment), and not directly to his wife. This is perhaps the problem with our culture today - we do not admit how we feel about a situation, because we are moulded by the media (and people around us) that it is wrong to admit weaknesses and submit to the natural human state.