In Flame Review!

ACTING HIGHLIGHTS:

All actors portrayed totally different characters, all of which superb and unique. My favourite was Alex. Her role was quite simple, there was no real stereotype she could follow yet the depth of Alex and her problems she held within her made me have empathy for her. The actions were kept to a minimal but the facial expressions showed exactly what Alex was thinking and feeling. I could tell from the start that she loved her mother but didn’t have the means, time or patience to look after her and that she thought her mother would be better off somewhere that she could be look ed after properly. The character’s naivety of falling in love with a married man and thinking he would leave his wife was a shock because the character seemed as though she was intelligent and level headed enough to listen to her brain. So I thought this was especially good. I also liked the end where she exploded up at the rest of them. It left me speechless, as I wasn’t expecting her to do that. I felt mortified for Alex because her world had been turned upside down. I picked this actress because although she wasn’t the most noticeable, the complexity of the character was shown throughout and she took me through so many emotions.

COMPARISONS:

TASK 1:THE RESPONSE PHASE (summary of work)

Investigating the title: ‘My Mother said I never should’ we looked at the nursery rhyme. I knew gypsies were once tarnished with the same brush as paedophiles. So my group and me explored this and made a short piece showing children listening to their mother and not going off with the strange man wanting to take them away.
We got into pairs and noted down the structure of the play. We wrote down the waste ground scenes separately. We briefly explained what happened in each scene. We discovered the nature of the play was episodic, as the plot unfolded. The waste ground scenes reinforced this and the themes. There were references to symbolism and Brecht.
We researched, in groups, either set or costume, I chose costume. We looked at the play to find the ages of the 4 children when they first appeared in the play and the time periods. We looked at typical clothing from the time periods relevant and matched it to the description of the character’s clothing. We drew models of each character, fully clothed, and wrote notes of each part of the costume.
I worked with Danielle, David and Lauren. We investigated act 1, scene 1 to develop the 4 characters. We then made a performance to the group and were hot-seated in role. I feel we spent too much time talking and failed to get into the characters properly by developing them through acting. I prepared for the hot seating which helped me, but I found it hard to come up with things to say and remain in role.

Here we used hot-seating to try and get some depth of character, role-play so we would really feel and act how the character would, and marking the moment with thought tracking to understand what the character thinks behind the physicality of human contact

We used a stimulus (ring-a-ring-a-roses poem) to make a short piece. We decided we were going to do our piece based around World War 2. We used various drama techniques including marking the moment, mime, tableau and thought tracking I played a little girl at the end and I had a monologue to perform. I ...

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Here we used hot-seating to try and get some depth of character, role-play so we would really feel and act how the character would, and marking the moment with thought tracking to understand what the character thinks behind the physicality of human contact

We used a stimulus (ring-a-ring-a-roses poem) to make a short piece. We decided we were going to do our piece based around World War 2. We used various drama techniques including marking the moment, mime, tableau and thought tracking I played a little girl at the end and I had a monologue to perform. I wrote it myself and I thought it was really good. I tried to put feeling into it and thought how I would feel if I’d lost my father.

We used various drama techniques including tableau, thought tracking, role-play, crosscutting, and marking the moment. These helped to link in the plot and create an atmosphere. We told the story of what happened in the war and the effects on the families who lost loved once.

I worked with Hailey, Lisa and Danielle. We explored act 3 scene 1 so to establish Doris and Margaret’s relationship, jealousy and the underlying secrets of what they say and what they actually mean. We used thought tracking to develop the subtext of their conversations and to understand the character better and their feelings towards one another. We found they avoided talking to each other about what’s really going on in their lives. Our thought tracking was rather powerful at the end because the last lines of speech were said with the thought tracking. We felt it was the only part in the scene where the characters were saying what they meant so the thoughts said it as well to emphasize this. That was my idea and I was shocked at how well it came across.
We went to see the play ‘In flame’ which I really enjoyed. It helped me with the ‘My mother said’ work. It also gave us something to compare in the evaluation. They used many interesting techniques.
I worked with Danielle, Emma and Laura. Mrs Chicken put us into groups and gave us each a monologue, mine had Jackie’s. We had to highlight the underlying thoughts and reasons behind Jackie giving up Rosie to Margaret and how she really felt about doing it.

We used thought-tracking to get to Jackie’s true feelings and tableau’s to capture the main points where Jackie was finding it tough to bring up Rosie and the events that lead up to her giving her away. Emma read out the monologue and the rest of us acted out the sub-texts. I think I worked well with these people and I enjoyed the assessment. My ideas flowed easily.

The teacher lead a discussion about the last waste ground scene and its connections with the scenes before and after it. We found that the first waste ground scene showed Jackie being the boss but in the last one she’s by herself and we realised that it coincided with the normal scenes because Jackie was out of the picture at the end of the play.
I worked with Emma, Lisa, Lauren and Laura. We used the idea of solitaire at the end of the play and the key texts from act 3 scene 7, to illustrate Keatley’s idea that a mother urges her child onwards to success and the child progresses a step further from their mother. We wanted to show the progression of the 4 characters from their mothers with Rosie being the most developed. We played the characters as solitaire pieces and the characters stepped over their mothers to show the gradual progression. We left Rosie to win and interlinked the people actually playing solitaire and winning with her character. We played the final scene at the end because in it Rosie is trying to figure out the secret to solitaire and, as we wanted to show Rosie figuring out how to be the most successful and beating everyone else in life and in the game. (I.e. becoming the winner).

TASK 2: THE DEVELOPMENT PHASE (details of a piece of work)

This was my fifth assessment: FIRST DEVELOPMENT STAGE

I worked with Lisa, Lauren and Dani. The teacher gave each group a nursery rhyme relevant to the play ‘My mother said’ so we could devise a piece. These poems were ‘Georgie Porgy’, ‘Ring-a-ring-a-roses’, and ‘Ding-dong-bell’.

My group were given ‘Ring-a-ring-a-roses’ which was the one we actually wanted. We had plenty of immediate ideas and we wrote down each one so we could evaluate them.

We decided to swap the version we were given of the poem because we knew we wouldn’t use the whole of it because it had lots of different meanings. So, instead, we decided to use the version we knew and grew up with. That version was originally about the plague and the deaths caused from it. So, I suggested using the plague as a starting idea for the piece. But, then we were told the task was to be a modern interpretation of the poem. We scraped the idea and tried to think more modern. I was glad because I wanted it to be more of an original representation.

We thought of other large diseases that are still common today as we really wanted to base the piece around disease and death. We came up with many ideas including aids and cancer.

Then, I looked at the title more closely and noticed the ‘Ring of roses’ part. I immediately thought of a reef of poppies. I suggested basing our piece around the war and Remembrance Day. This fitted with the idea of ‘mass death’ (‘ashes; in the water’ means death) so we chose this idea to build on.

I was really surprised at how sophisticated our ideas were as this was the first time we’d used a stimulus and I envisioned it being quite powerful as the final piece.

We thought, first, of a family on Remembrance Day pining at a grave of a lost relative, then to crosscut and show a tableau of the actual war.

We wanted to make the war sequence as real as possible and not cheesy. We kept a tableau physicalising the jobs and what would have been going on in the trenches and then Lisa came up with the idea of using sound to create an explosion. I thought this was a good idea as it was introducing a new medium and it would also actually show death in action.

The problem was how to actually make it look realistic. Lauren suggested using the sound effect of a bomb and the four characters in the trench could react by seeing it and trying to get away from it. I thought it would be better in slow motion because that way we could show the horror on the character’s faces.

We got up and started the beginning of our sequence (the grave scene on remembrance day). We were going to show a family crying at a grave but I thought it would be more powerful as a tableau. We arranged ourselves, me kneeling, Dani and Lisa kneeling higher either side of me, and Lauren the mum standing behind us. We decided to recite the poem in drama neutral, then, go into character with a single movement for me to put an invisible wreath down on the grave and the other 3 to put their hands to their faces to cry. We froze and then walked into the next section.

We crosscut back to the war and a trench sequence. We arranged our positions so two of us were loading guns, one was reading a letter from a loved one and one was looking over the top of the trench (all huddled together). We slowly looked up and moved to get away from the bomb coming towards us. We spent the rest of the lesson looking for music to create the bomb.

SECOND DEVELOPMENT STAGE

We returned to the beginning grave sequence to try and make it better. I thought of showing that it’s Remembrance Day, as we couldn’t show the reef and therefore the date. I said we could use a sound effect of a clock chiming but we couldn’t find one. We still wanted to use this idea so we did the noise ourselves, 5 chimes at the beginning 5 at the end.

We hadn’t found a sound for the bomb either so we wanted to change that bit too. We wanted to show the 4 characters fear and the condition in the trenches. So we, together, came up with a thought tracking-sequence and I wrote lines we would say.

We showed Lisa reading a letter then kneeling up and saying how much the character missed their partner, Dani described the cold and wet in the trench, Lauren said she was scared because she was the lookout and I told of the horror and decision of either killing or ending up killed.

We then got up and briefly spoke to each other before we showed the facial expressions of post ‘going over the top’ fear.

I thought this sequence was good because it really got beneath the characters’. I tried to put as much feeling into my voice, expression and words as I could be; I felt I was really in role. We then decided we were going to add a whole new section. We wanted to crosscut back to the future and show some children using the poem ‘Ring-a-ring-a-roses’.

We sang the poem whilst holding hands and spinning in a circle. We also wanted to incorporate a serious element to it so we decided we would have a little girl talking to the audience about loosing her father.

I was going to be that little girl. I wrote a monologue about loosing my father and how brave he was and how much I loved him and missed him.

I started by sitting away from the girls and looking at a picture of my dad (without a prop). The girls sang ‘Ring-a-ring-a-roses a pocket full of poses, a-tishoo, a-tishoo, we all fall down’ then continued playing in mime while I talked to the audience of my loss. The other girls came over and asked me to play but the little girl made an excuse and the others carried on playing unaware of the commitment and sacrifice the men in the war had made in order for them to live in freedom and happiness.

We froze and the final 4 chimes rang out symbolising the end of the piece.

I thought I played the little girl well as I added feeling and thought to every word and gesture. I tried to think how I would actually feel to loose a loved one and wrote the lines from the heart. I think this came across. I was really pleased with the overall outcome of this piece, as it was moving and powerful. I got to actually act which I loved and felt my roles were kept throughout. It was original and creative. I was impressed at how our ideas came together to develop a symbolic story of a child’s background.

I think the piece would have been better with music if we had had the time to add it. Also with props it could have been improved because the audience would have got the fact that it was Remembrance Day (because of the poppy wreath). Maybe we could have also added a scene with the little girl’s family and how loosing a loved one has changed their lives.

ANALYSIS OF ANOTHER GROUPS PIECE WHICH I FOUND EFFECTIVE.