Comparitive essay

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Comparative Essay-Devised piece

In our devised piece this term we used the play “ TWO” written by Jim Cartwright as our stimulus. The play is set in a Northern ‘working’ town in a pub and all the action and events take place on one night. It’s about a bickering landlord and landlady and their eccentric customers whom they serve at the bar. It gives an insight into the different kinds of people present in a pub at different times and a very brief look into their lives. The play is made up of lots of vignettes each focusing in on different characters. The two key characters are the landlord and landlady however these two people play all of the characters and have to change between roles with minimum fuss. The play also has a hidden meaning, which we do not find out about until the end, which in this case then makes some of the arguing clear, as we can understand the reasons behind it all. There is an element of humour and laughter used to cover up a darker and sadder under current in the play. In this case it’s about the couples child dieing in a car accident at the young age of seven.

We took some elements of ‘TWO’ and incorporated some of the themes, ideas and elements into our own devised pieces. Our play consisted of a lot of duologues and monologues just as ‘TWO’ had done and we also chose two pivotal characters. Instead of having a landlord and a landlady we had two shop assistants who spoke to all of the customers and kept the play upbeat and moving. ‘TWO’ had a specific location where all of the action took place so we decided to incorporate this and we had all of our action and plot line take place in the clothing part of a department store. We kept it quite everything quite simplistic as in Jim Cartwright’s play although we had a variety of lively, bubbly characters each of which was very different from each other. The other idea we took from ‘TWO’ was to have a hidden story or event, which the audience didn’t find out about until the end. We put in about the manager having lost his sister and wanting to hold on to all of the memories and not let another child go which explains the children’s underwear and the managers nervousness when a lost child comes in.

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Our plot revolved around the two shop assistants who ran the store and interacted with all of the customers. We also had the manager and the manager’s wife as well as mimed and imagined people out in public, in the shop and on the bus. The only props we used were chairs, a table, two umbrellas, some notebooks and a mesh curtain, which we used in the changing room scene. We chose to keep it quite simple so the audience had to believe in what was going on and focus on the acting rather than the material props just ...

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