Hot seating is an important factor towards the development of any type of character. For our original piece of drama we used this technique. At that point most of us had no character established at all. Hot seating helped us a lot in giving us characters then developing them quickly. We had to think on the spot about things like our name, personalities and reasons why we were fighting in the war. Hot seating meant we were not delaying the process in which we needed to develop our characters. Even if we did end up starting again we could still carry on our already developed characters into a new story line so it was almost easier to think of something because we had a rough outline of some basic characters.
Narration was a main thing that we used in our performance. The main character ‘John’ was basically narrating throughout the whole drama piece. He described what was going on and gave some information about himself and the other characters involved. Having a narration taking place as well as drama, we were hoping the audience would find it more interesting to watch and easier to understand. Having Ben/John narrating it in the presence tense also would trick the audience into thinking that he was a living man, who was just narrating his life – and the moment he died. Having a narration would make the last scene much more dramatic because the audience would discover what had really happened; - it would come as a shock.
Our performance was basically linear. John narrated his life in the wa5t like he was watching it from somewhere else. Performing it linear would be simpler for the audience to follow. We thought it would be effective to keep it really simple for the majority of the play and have a twist at the end. That way it makes the twist much more dramatic as there have been no really dramatic moments so it made the end scene even more effective as the audience wouldn’t have been expecting it. Performing it linear worked because it was much more understandable. Our original piece became very complicated because we were constantly cross – cutting. We found this didn’t work and stuck to a linear performance.
Our drama wasn’t exactly stylised but it wasn’t really naturalistic either. It became stylised by having a dead character narrator walking and chatting about what was going on in the scene. The narrating part of our performance wasn’t but the more drama and acting side was fairly naturalistic and stylised drama is good and can be effective. The naturalistic side of things kept it simple but still effective. It made it more understandable as well, as it wasn’t so stylised that it got to be complicated. Our stage setting was fairly stylised because the trench was open both sides – the soldiers went over both sides. The stage was set out like this:
Obviously in World War 1 soldiers would not have gone over both edges so this makes it stylised. We chose to do this because it adds variation to the scene. It also looks much better as John walks down the middle he has soldiers on either side of him.
We used tableau images frequently in our performance. In scene three characters take it in turns to do monologues. The whole scene freezes when this happens. This keeps the audience’s attention focused on the person doing the monologue thus making it more effective. We also only ever speak when performing our monologues. We mimed when John was speaking which was most of the time. It kept the attention of him and mime aided him in his telling of his story so the audience could understand easier.
The overall reaction we wanted the audience to have was quite a powerful one but we didn’t manage to perform enough to do this. We wanted our drama to shock them at the end when they found out the truth. We also wanted the audience to think about it and make them ask questions – so a thought provoking reaction. We tried to stylise it in a way which would make the audience think ‘why did that happen?’ or ‘what happened next?’ to make it more interesting to them and grab their attention. I think if we completed it we could of achieved this.
