Skungpoomery - Textual Analysis.

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GCSE Drama Coursework2

Skungpoomery – Textual Analysis

We used the text Skungpoomery as a starting point for our scripted pieces we used this text to look at ways of developing a character and using the space within a rehearsal process. It’s a comedy piece but like all comedy pieces it needs to work to be funny and the jokes have to be clear, comedy pieces are really one of the hardest kinds of performances you can ether do them or you can’t. I this piece uses two stereotypical characters as the basis for the humour, a week and easily dominated son and a formidable and dominant mother. The good thing about this piece is that you can make it very funny by having the mother played by a male like a pinto dame. To gain a good prospectus for the characters we did two things that helped build up an idea of them, first of all we did hot seating we got to people out of the class and one was the boy – PC Nicholas Wibble and the other was Mrs Wibble. They would sit in the centre of a circle and we would ask them questions and they would have to answer them as if they were the character. This did help a lot with creating the character it also helps to build a back round for the character which you can think about when you are being that person. The second thing we did was to build up in our minds what they would look like and put it on paper this gave us an understanding of their physical started and would help with the way they would move around the set. The two characters differ in the way they react to things as soon as the piece starts you can see the Mrs Wibble is mothering her son who is now a grown man we can see this by Nicholas Wibble saying ‘But all the other policeman wear boots’ we straight away are a ware that he has a job and is still living at home and also that his mother is still telling him what he is to wear this is where the image of him being weak and under his mothers control really comes in. Mrs Wibble is always talking down to him and refers to him by using phrasing such as ‘ you little fibber’ ‘good boy’ all the kinds of things you would say to a young child.

Set Design – Skungpoomery

I am now going to look at apart of the sprit which takes a lot of choreographing it’s the part when Mrs Wibble takes Nicolas’s trousers off and then goes on to pick the iron up instead of the phone. We spent quite a lot of time looking at this we had to get the part where he has to take is trousers off so it was him being shi and then the bossiness of Mrs Wibble coming across. We then had to work on the timing of her picking up the phone and to make sure it wasn’t just a big mess with the two characters just screaming and running around the stage. We did it so she would pick up the phone scream as soon as she screams and shouts  ‘Butter! Get the butter, Nicholas!’ he would grab the butter and as he runs towards her and as he does he trips up but as he does the butter goes on to the side of her face and Mrs Wibble would then take hold of it, this took a lot of practising and was hard to get rite but when we did it worked really well. The one thing you really needed to think about with the piece is the set because there is a lot of moving around the set and where things are poisoned in comparison to everything else really matters to make the quick jokes work to help us with rehearsing it because we couldn’t set the set up every time we rote on paper the piece of set that we needed and would arrange them on the floor where we wanted them to be. The things had had to really be placed rite were the ironing broad and a table with the phone on these needed to be together so that she can pick the iron up as the phone because if it wasn’t near it wouldn’t work as well. There is a bit in the script when Mrs Wibble drags Nicholas to the sink and starts to scrub his tie the sink needs to be near the back of the set so it fits in because you wouldn’t really have it in the middle of the kitchen but at the same time it needs to be in a place where you can see what’s going on and so that no one will have there back to the audience so had it directly at the back of the stage and would be poisoned ether side of the sink so there was no blocking.  The play is a comedy piece but the set needs to be realistic to the way its written it if its not then the play wont work. The final piece that I did was a serious piece and the set was quite basic but it had to be realistic to bring across the idea of a well off family and a young teenage child.

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All these techniques came in very help full when setting the stage for our final piece because we could use all the things and it made it a lot easier to work out where everything would be and we could then have a clear idea of where everything was in comparison to each other.

When it came to our final performance we looked at the set design for Cinderella the design of the staircase this helped me with my piece because it gave me the idea to start looking at different types of beds because there are two beds ...

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