Michael Bretherton
Drama
Mr McGuire
The Normalising Machine
The normalising machine has two parts to it and I am going to talk about the first part that is what we did in the lessons. We started off by looking at the characters. We had to make a little improvisation up about how the characters are put across to us. We used still images, role plays and prepared improvisations. We had to make it obvious that the characters were greedy, manipulative and just plain stupid. The lessons then progressed and we started to take scenes from the normalising machine book. We made it, again obvious that the characters were greedy, manipulative and plain stupid. We took each lesson one at a time and kept trying to make it more and more obvious that the characters are who they are and people had to guess who was who in the play. We looked at everyone else’s performances and discussed their ideas and attitudes towards the play. Some examples of the other group’s ideas are: Using different levels, pushing people down to make it seem like they are in control, using still images to emphasise the point they are putting across and using split staging to make it obvious of what they are doing. We discussed how these ideas helped the drama to progress onto the next stage which was trying to be over the top within the role of a character from the normalising machine. I found it very hard to be over the top and I think a lot of other people in the class did too. The drama had to be over the top because the play is very comical and if we weren’t over the top then it would have just been plain, simple, boring and totally rubbish. I thought that being over the top was a good thing to do but it is also a very hard thing to do. For instance, when Rudolf met Trudy at the tube station, he was so over the top and so outrageous that some people actually got worried that they were too over the top. Also when Rudolf met Mr and Mrs Tolerant he was also very over the top. This was very effective because the Mr Tolerant wanted to beat Rudolf up and he actually got scared of Rudolf because the character was “full of beans” and “giddy” as some people said, and when Mrs Tolerant said Rudolf was embarrassing her he got “frustrated” and “worked up” as some people said and he told Mr Tolerant to ask him to leave but Mr Tolerant insisted that he stayed. The only thing with Rudolf is that he sometimes gets worked up and feels frustrated because he is doing things wrong when he actually isn’t but he thinks he is.
