My Mother Said I Never Should - response.

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        MARÍA-PAULINA SOCARRÁS        8169

MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD - PAPER 1: UNIT 2

My Mother Said I Never Should follows the story of four generations of women, a great-grand-daughter a daughter, a mother and a grandmother, grappling with social forces that threaten to split them apart as the twentieth century grows older. Widely studied on Drama syllabuses the play moves back and forth through the lives of the women, it sets the enormous social changes of this century against the needs of the individual.

After reading the play mentioned, my initial sentiments on it were that I highly enjoyed it because I found it highly engaging and very original and abstract by its use of different time frames and using the ‘waste-ground scenes’ as a type of limbo where time is of no consequence and causes the reader to primarily focus on the relationships between each woman. Nonetheless, I found myself becoming highly confused whilst reading the play due to the constant switching between time frames.

In my opinion, I think the playwright is trying to convey the hidden relationships between women within the same family. She tries to show how each of the women interact with each other and how the role of women in society can change within each generation. Keatley tries to focus primarily on women and I feel that the men within the play were portrayed as the draw-backs of the women, for example, in the play Margaret becomes highly depressed due to her failing marriage with Ken. Another example would be that Jackie’s career and opportunity for the future could’ve been destroyed because she fell pregnant with Neil’s baby, and soon after, Neil abandons her. The message the playwright was trying to put across is the how the unique bonds between mothers and daughters survives behind closed doors, and how secrecy may slowly destroy a family.    

The practical problems I foresaw in performing this play were being able to mentally as well as physically change myself into a female child, teenager, adult or old woman. I also found it challenging to be able to relate to each character and infuse a little part of my personality to each of them. I found I had these problems because I have not experienced some of the things the characters within the play had done. I managed to overcome this by remembering certain plays/television programmes/films I have seen that cover the certain subjects that each character was going through, for example when Jackie fell pregnant, I thought of ‘Lolita’ by Stanley Kubrick when Lolita falls pregnant at 16/17.

The cast list comprises of four generations of women within the same family, all of different ages and opinions. These women are Doris Partington, Margaret Bradley, Jackie Metcalfe and Rosie Metcalfe. Doris was a woman born in the beginning of the 20th century with old-fashioned ideals and she seems altogether a psychologically stable person and obviously she has had to deal with certain discrimination over her gender in her life. She seems wise and just in her ways and always gives the best advice for the right occasions. Her relationships with the other women are very visible because she is extremely close to each one of them in different ways. Margaret, Jackie and Rosie all tend to confide in Doris much more then each other as Doris seems far more calm, wise and level-headed, possibly due to the fact that she was brought up in a very out of place upbringing for that certain era. Doris mother was a single parent and during those times, it was truly unheard of. This is possibly why Doris is not as uptight as maybe people of her same generation should be. Margaret is a much more complex role because it is obvious that she is a very troubled woman and she does not like to confront her problems and tends to conceal whatever troubles she is having. Out of all the women, Margaret seems to be the more uptight, possibly due to her very formal upbringing. In my eyes, I can see that Margaret finds it vastly difficult to escape out of formality even when she is in the company of those who love her dearly and visa versa. Her relationships with the other women are again extremely formal and it hardly ever breaks out of that reserve. Jackie is the typical authoritative character and it is clear that during the ‘waste-ground’ scenes that she is obviously in charge. She is a very independent person and only relies on others as a last resort. She is a career-minded woman and she focuses wholly on her work and at times disregards the world around her. She far more relaxed than her mother Margaret but still finds dramas within her relationships with others. This is best shown in the relationship between her and Margaret as there is obvious tension between both women even though they are mother and daughter. Rosie is not a complex role to grasp seeing as the oldest she becomes in the play is sixteen. Nonetheless she is a free-minded spirit and it is obvious to see that she has a certain disregard for rules. As she is quite young, she builds solid relationships with the other three women. She loves each of them in different ways and because she is so unconventional, the other women seem to find her to be refreshing company.

The action of the play unfolds in Manchester, Oldham and London and a surreal ‘limbo’ space where the girls come to play each dressed to their own generation, called ‘The Wasteground’ and the action unfolds between the years of 1923 and 1987. We initially explored each character by investigating the differences between a child (like the girls in the wasteground scenes), a teenager, a mother and an old woman. We did an exercise in which we performed our own interpretations of an ‘angry child’, an ‘angry teenager’ and an ‘angry mother’. We explored this further by showing our own interpretations of a ‘worried child’, ‘worried teenager’ and a ‘worried mother’. This exercise incorporates all the characters in the play at one point in the actually play itself, for example, when we showed our interpretation of an angry child, it represented Rosie’s reaction when Jackie shouts at her in Act One, Scene 10. We developed an angry child from being sulky into a child throwing a huge tantrum. The exploratory strategies used during this exercise were mime, gesture, characterisation, vocal tone and stereotyping. We used mime in showing our interpretation of an angry child, for example I pretended to kick a can in a stubbornly manner in silence to convey the utter frustration the child was going through without using words to promote a much more powerful outcome. In other words I was trying to show that my anger was beyond words and sound. Gestures were used throughout this exercise to show the role’s exact emotions to our audience. When we were portraying our interpretation of a worried mother, I used my hands a lot, for example I was wringing them and covering my mouth with them to show my desperation. Characterisation was also used throughout in order to develop the type of role we were going to represent. In other words I used characterisation in pretending to be a worried teenager by relating to past experiences I had and bringing them out in my performance to show that what I was performing was actually a true experience and that I was trying to make it as realistic to myself as well as my audience. I used vocal tone in showing my emotions with sound and voice, for example, when I was portraying an angry child, I used a high-pitched voice to show that I was playing a child and I pronounced every word in a short and sharp manner to give an air of spoilt finality. I spoke in a very whinging manner to show that I wasn’t going to stop until I got what I wanted. This helped me explore my role because it showed exactly what type of character I was trying to play, which also included the use of stereotyping because in order to prove that I was playing a certain type of role, for example, if I was trying to represent an old woman, I would feed on the typical interpretation or stereotype of an old woman and adjust it to suit me and what I thought an old woman would be like. All these exploratory strategies were helpful in aiding me to develop my role. At first the exercise felt strange to me as I normally do not focus on exactly how each character would move, walk, and speak or what their body language would be like, but the exploratory strategies helped me look past this unfamiliarity and properly get into each role. Soon after it became less awkward and I managed to properly feel what my role was feeling and by the end of the exercise, there was a massive improvement in how I interpreted each character.

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Body language is such an important part of exploring a character and performance because it shows the exact emotions the role is feeling regardless of whether sound is used or not. It can tell someone about a character’s mood, for example, if I were to wring my hands, it would instantly show that I am worried or if I were to clench my fists, it would show that I am feeling anger. Body language can also suggest the type of character the person obtains, for example, a shy and tense individual would use completely different body language to that of ...

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