At the end of the lesson we were set homework to put the reasons for and against Mrs Johnston giving away one of her twins. In my next drama lesson we were split into groups of four and were asked to write down some of the ideas we come up with. We then had to split up into pairs, and take on the role of either Mrs Johnston, who was pregnant and may not have been able to cope with another child both caring-wise and money-wise. Or we could have played the role of Mrs Lyons who could not have children of her own and desperately wanted a child, but her husband would not like to adopt as he said “he would not fill the same way about a child that is not his own”. At first I took on the role of Mrs Lyons, literally begging for a child, I then used role-reversal to swap places with a classmate. I found that role-reversal helped to give me a much better and clearer understanding of the play. I could see just how desperate Mrs Lyons was for a baby and that she would give anything to have one, but I can now also see how Mrs Johnston loves all of her children and how she would love to have them all. If I was in either of their situations I would not have a clue what I would do they are both tight situations.
My arguments for and against Miss Johnston giving away her baby were:
FOR:
- She cannot afford to provide the simple needs of the baby. While the Lyons can afford this and so much more.
- Mrs Johnstone feels that the baby will have a better education with Mrs Lyons.
- The baby will receive more attention from the Lyons because this will be their only child. Whereas Mrs Johnstone already has “eight mouths to feed.”
AGAINST
- It is her own baby and I believe that she would love it more than anybody else.
- She already has eight children, so I cannot see how much difference a ninth and tenth child will make.
- Superstition says that it will all result in death.
I also did reasons why Miss Lyons should and should not take the baby, and they looked like this:
FOR
- She cannot have any children of her own.
- This could be her one and only chance of ever having a baby.
- Mr Lyons has said he will not adopt, and by doing it this way he will believe that his wife has given birth naturally, due to the fact that he is working away for nine months.
AGAINST
- Her husband could find out, and it could result in a break up of their marriage.
- She would have to keep it a secret from everyone if she took one of the twins.
- Mrs Lyons is very superstitious and believes that if the twins ever found out that they were twins they would both die.
Finally we did some writing in role where we had to put our selves into Miss Johnstone’s life and write a diary pretending that we knew that Miss Lyons was coming round in the morning to collect one of the twins. Or we could be Miss Lyons and write about how we felt towards taking someone else’s child. I chose to take on the role of Miss Johnstone and wrote how devastated I was that I had to give away one of my own children and could not tell anyone. I also mentioned that she had no-one else to tell with her husband gone and how lonely she felt. I put that her son must seem priceless and even though Miss Lyons has offered money she would rather have her own son.
At one point in one of my recent drama lessons I was put in a pair with one of my class-mates. Once in that pair we were given a script to read through, which was the part where Mickey has his own monologue, we then had to rehearse a scene to go with it and perform back to the rest of the class and teacher, all within 15 minutes. So me and my class mate started straightaway by learning the lines to the best we could within time we was given. We then started to piece parts of the play together and tried to do something different from everyone else, making our performance stand out more. We thought of different drama techniques we could include in the performance and used ourselves to take on the role of being a director to enhance parts of the scene. We did this by using forum theatre and stepping out of the role for a little while to see how we could improve on our partner’s part better. Eventually our play turned out to be all right, we experimented by sitting an actor in the audience, whilst the other one read and acted half of the lines. We then swapped places by getting up and putting back to back and both turning 180 degrees in the same direction allowing both people to carry on the way they were, but with the other person in the opposite position (so if you were sitting in the audience, you’d have to be at the front, you would get up and go back to back with your class mate and turn 180 degrees with them and then peel off into your classmates position) using the other half of the lines and different actions to go with them.
In one of our lessons we were put into groups of four and given a script from one scene in the play. My group’s scene was a part when all of the children are playing together with imaginary guns, hand-grenades etcetera it was like a war, there was one side against the other. Every time someone died they would sing a made up song with the lyrics
“But you know that if you cross your fingers
And if you count from one to ten
You can get up off the ground again
It doesn’t matter
The whole things just a game”.
For example at one point one of us threw a hand-grenade and killed four of us but we helped each other back up whilst singing that song. The children would pretend to be different types of people, like professors and gangsters. Towards the end of the play one of the children swears and all the other children tell him the consequences of swearing, like “You’re gonna die, you’ll go to hell an’ there you’ll fry”. Overall our play turned out to be spectacular, we did just about everything right, we used the space well probably covering every square of carpet on the stage, we hardly ever stopped moving as children don’t, really. Everyone in our group used an accent (rather well) and belted out their voice so as everyone in the room could hear them. Even in rehearsals our voice was loud, (as children are loud) people would stop there rehearsals and watch ours for a little while as it grabbed there attention. Also in our voice we made it higher pitched to make it seem more like a Childs voice. We used many different techniques in the play, freeze frame allowing the audience to see what has happened, mime so as the spectators could focus-in more on the main characters, and our role-play was brilliant. The staging we used was end on and looked similar to this...
KEY
Audience
Acting space
Walls
I suppose in some ways the plot was full of action as children were forever dieing then coming back to life, but in other ways it was not as none of the action was real everything was imaginary. We also used some Brechtian Techniques like playing sad, slow music towards the end of the scene when one of the children (Mickey, one of the twins) was upset as he though he was going to die because he “Said the ‘F’ word”. We also distanced the audience slightly from the play showing that it was not real, as the children were dieing then coming back to life after counting to 10. We mainly used Brechtian Techniques before the play started to get ourselves thinking like the character would and acting like the character would. The play itself did not really have that bigger climax as none of it could really happen and it was just kids pretending everything, although it was still interesting to watch as anything could have happened next. All the audience laughed at the funny parts and felt sorry for Mickey when he thought he was going to die, despite knowing that he can’t die because he swore. The tempo of the play was very fast as all the children are quite hyper though we did slow it down in parts by using physical theatre, where we acted in slow motion without any words. Before the play we did writing on the wall where we drew a picture of our character and wrote inside him/her on what they are like. In the play we did not use any lighting, but if we did it would have been a nice bright white light gleaming on the stage, to represent that we are kids, it’s a nice bright day and there was no danger. Although when Mickey swore I would have changed the light to a red spot light on Mickey, to show that to them it means danger and something might happen, as red represents death, danger and blood. In the play we did not have the biggest of stages but we tried to fill it up as much as we could, as children are very hyper active and run around all the time, so our action went from one area to another. We ran everywhere and were very energetic, I think we covered most of the space as best we could and thought that our play seemed to turn out good, we managed to take on even the slightest of details that children do, like run everywhere, roll around and pulled our jumpers over our knees when we were sitting.