The most useful material I looked at was an article on the effects of cocaine, and marijuana, because as we were aiming our production at a fairly young age group, these are the drugs they are most likely to be introduced to, as they are low class but still very dangerous, we needed to know what was in these drugs and how they affected people so any reference we made to them in the performance would be accurate and inform the children of the facts. The film ‘From Hell’ was also useful as the detective uses the opium to ‘escape reality’ which overall is one of the most popular reasons we found people take drugs and this was a good example.
Our piece was set in 2003; we made it modern because of our target audience so they could relate to the people and places. However ‘From Hell’ is set at the turn of the 20th century, the only similarities between this and our performance is the reason for the taking of the drugs, again the ‘escaping reality’ theme. It is a lot different because during this time period there wasn’t so much the risk in taking drugs (i.e. now there is AIDS drugs increases that risk) and also it wasn’t so widespread and on offer as much as it is today.
The people who appear in our production are mainly in their early teens. In contrast the films we looked at were mostly about older people apart from the articles we read. You could tell this because in contrast to the characters in the films our characters are not as knowledgeable and used to drugs, and you can tell they are new to them and experimenting by them not knowing of the risks and considering drugs a laugh, a way to become part of a crowd, the characters in the films are more doing drugs for the self pleasure and not so much because of pressure from other people.
Our play was of a modern culture, the characters are typical teenagers of modern times and they face the problems that most teenagers face, they are more dependant on being socially accepted among friends and the problems they have surround this. We showed this by our main characters feeling they are being forced into drugs and alcohol because of peer pressure ant wanted to fit in, or simply believing it to be the only way in which to have a good time.
We chose to perform our play in the style of realism because we wanted to show the reality of social life for children and teenagers, and wanted something our target audience could relate to, we used bits of humour in our performance so to keep the audience’s interest because of them being younger, and so that they wouldn’t find the subject we were approaching daunting and seem we were using scare tactics. Our ‘realistic’ situations were a party scene in where a girl is being mocked for not drinking and smoking and feeling like she is a freak, but then realises she doesn’t need to conform to be the best, a scene on a talk show where a guy is risking his job and friends because he can’t give up his drugs, and a monologue where a girl feels she will lose her ‘new cool friends’ if she doesn’t fit in by smoking cannabis. The ‘ready Steady Cook’ scene is the only one that is less realistic but this is purposely done, we basically make it like the cookery show but using drugs as ingredients, to show how bad they are for you and how silly it seems to be using them. We also introduced stylising our actions into the play, which we haven’t done in previous performances, to make it look more professional and comical in places (i.e the line ‘smoking, drinking, dancing and Dave we stylised to make it stand out and be funny.)
I conclusion, I would like to say that I have learnt though my research that drug awareness in children is very important as they either don’t know about drugs or see them as unimportant. Also this is the first performance we have stylised sections in and I found this helpful because we may use it in the future to make our performances look more professional/rehearsed, and also I have learnt new methods of keeping audiences interested (i.e going from comical to serious in dips throughout the play.)
