Blood Brothers Portfolio.

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Blood Brothers Portfolio

For this section of the exam we have been studying and exploring the play “Blood Brothers” by Willy Russel. We have used many explorative strategies to help us interrupt the text and show us the themes and issues of the play. I enjoyed most of the exercises we did, but found many of them challenging. At the start of the workshop, I found it extremely hard to use a Liverpool accent effectively, and I tried to get around this problem by not using one at all. However, I found that this did not solve the problem as the accent was an important property of the characters and emphasised the rich/poor divide.

We used many explorative strategies to explore the themes, issues and characters brought up in the play. One exercise, which help me explore all of these, was hot sitting. We asked Edward and Mickey questions and interviewed them as an adult and as children. It was interesting to see that their opinions of the world were very similar when they were children, but very different as adults. This shows us, that no matter how similar two people are, if they are born into two different classes, they’re paths will lead away from each other. It was also interesting to see how Edwards opinion as an adult was much more childish and ignorant then Mickey’s. This is probably because Edward had never had a financial difficulty in his life, so he couldn’t understand what real life is like. However Mickey is the complete opposite. It also helped me to understand the challenges facing the professional actors who performed to play. I found it hard to convey a character of a young age and then convey the same character at a much older age. I change the pitch of my voice, but tried to carry my body in a similar, yet more mature way as an adult.

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We also did a role-play which was very similar to hot sitting were Mrs Lyons went to see a therapist. This was similar to hot sitting because towards the end of the role-play Mrs Lyons began to be totally honest with the therapist and let the audience get inside her head. I learnt that my interpretation of Mrs Lyons’ character was not as cold hearted as I originally thought from the text. She did care for her Edward and felt a great deal of guilt at his death. However, she did place most of the guilt on Mickey and Mrs ...

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