This, I can imagine would be quite amusing for the audience. In this scene, David Halliwell creates dramatic irony. The audience know that the robbery will never go as smoothly as the students had planned out and this helps the atmosphere become more comical.
I think in this scene, the four students would be wearing something casual. Such as jeans, a dark shirt and trainers.
For this scene, I think the setting would be quite simple, a bed in the middle of the stage and a table with a few stools round it to the side of the stage. I would use fairly bright general lights.
Harold Pinter does the same at the beginning of his play; his two characters Gus and Ben seem just as dense. Gus seems incapable of doing his shoelaces, and keeps finding boxes in his shoes. Whereas Ben seems completely oblivious to the fact that they were waiting for important information about their next job. He sits and reads his paper, occasionally he makes a couple of comments about what is in it, even when Gus wants to ask him a question, Ben avoids the subject and starts talking about his paper. They both seem quite nervous and alert about their job. Though they are precautious, they don’t seem to think about what the messages might mean. For instance, the matches that were sent to them. The two men don’t think about what message they were being sent, instead it leads to an argument about kettles.
This also creates an atmosphere of humour for the audience. I imagine the two men would be wearing comfortable clothing, maybe a T-shirt and shorts as they would not really be leaving their basement room much, and were most probably just in bed the majority of the time.
If I was directing this play, I would set the scene as Pinter had suggested:
Scene: A basement room. Two beds, flat against the back wall. A serving hatch, closed, between the beds. A door to the kitchen and lavatory, left. A door to a passage, right.
I would use dim general lights.
My piece of improvised work is quite similar to both extracts; a couple of my characters were quite amusing. Sophie, who played the circus master, was funny because she was so obsessed with her circus, and so arrogant about it, that she irritated the other characters by being so. Also, our characters would always argue about things such as money, and who was going to talk to Kathryn, the ‘uncooperative’ one, in scene two. We wanted the audience to laugh at Sophie and despise Kathryn, as well as wonder what she was planning to do. Over all we were hoping they would think we were all stupid.
In the fourth scene at the airport, we were trying to create more comedy by being stupidly indiscreet about each other. All the characters were quite stupid about what to do. They were not ready for such a sudden event; they did not think they would ever get caught. We tried to build tension in this scene using dramatic pauses, for example, when the sirens came there were a couple of pauses as both the characters and the audience were wondering what was going to happen next.
We wanted our whole piece to be comical, and at the same time with a bit of action. For example the movement scene and the shooting scene at the end. We hoped we could build up to the climax by having a lot of panicking and shouting before suddenly dying.
Evaluation.
Over all I think the performance went according to plan. The lighting in the second scene didn’t go as well as we’d hoped it would, as the front right light wouldn’t work, and the lighting was not on the right people at the right time. In the end we managed to get everything together, such as our music for the movement scene. Sounding went as planned; I think it worked quite well. We were quite worried the gunshot wouldn’t work in the fourth scene when Clarissa shot Mishe, but we were hoping it would shoot and luckily it did. Though I think we could have slowed the whole piece down a little bit by not rushing as much. The performance went quite well, but I feel we could have done better if we had practised a little more!
