Drama improvisation coursework:
Crime
We first discussed everything that came up to our mind about our topic of crime. We used brainstorming to help us, like this:
We then had a closer look at plays about crime in Elizabethan times. Macbeth is a classic example of crime involving murdering. It is a story about Macbeth who was the Thane of Cawdor was being influenced by his wife and the witches to kill the King. He then became the King himself and killed many other people who wanted to stop him. Throughout the play, Shakespeare described clearly about how Macbeth’s character changes, from gentle to ambitious, to the never-ending evil. From this play, we noticed that one of the motives of committing a crime is being over ambitious and to believe in someone too easily. This could be seen particularly in Act.i sci.vii. Here, we are introduced to a scene when Lady Macbeth tries to persuade Macbeth to kill the King. Macbeth feared about the deep consequences and he refused to do the ‘deed’. However, Lady Macbeth argued that if he is afraid, he is not a real man. This attacked Macbeth’s self esteem instantly and he immediately changed his mind. We first tried out the scene by reading through it with my partner. I acted as Macbeth and I first found it very difficult to understand and to say the Shakespeare language. I overcome this by slowing down the pace, emphasising every word I was going to say. In order to improve our performance, we did an exercise. We grouped all the Macbeths’ on one side and all the Lady Macbeths’ on the other. We went through the scene altogether. I think this helped us a lot because by doing that, I overcome some limitations of movement and sound. I was able to express myself more.
