GCSE Drama AO2 - staging and prolouge

things simple. We were going to use no props or set, or costume. We had three narrators off the set but you could hear them from different spaces of the stage. We used blackout in the beginning. We also used the song Elysium - euphoric Chill out for our background music. At this stage our work needed a lot of work as no one was satisfied with the quality and effort.            We decided to improve our production and make it more effective by adding echo to the narrator’s speech on every important key word that we though was going to create lots of tension and mood! For example, on the line “who saw her children wrenched apart.” We echoed the word ‘wrenches’ for the audience to realise that violent word.                                  We also thought about our space, we were using a lot of space and the characters looked far apart from each other which were lowering the quality of our performance so we brought everything together and made the space look smaller.                                                                          We also tried to use non naturalistic uses for example, “with a stone in place of her heart” we were going to mime by showing the mother putting her fist on her chest/heart although we decided as a group to use that for our second production.                                                                 Our main character was the mother so we all gave ideas to improve on the roll of mother for example, Abby as the mother ended our production by crying on the floor which will engage the audience for sympathy.                                                                                 Characters: Kate – Narrator Laura - Narrator Janine – Narrator Abby – The real mother Behnaz – The other mother Scarlet – The child given away Tammy – The child kept Alex – the other dad For our second production we tried to keep everything different from our first one. We kept only one narrator and decided to keep her visual towards the audience. We did start with a black out but this time the whole lighting system is from above to indicate a spot light!                        We decided to use a high level for the narrator to walk on as she is telling us the story, looking down on the mother to show the kind of interview style in films idea and engaging the audience to judge the mother wrong. We used two blocks on top of each other for the narrator to walk on. We kept the lights dim to indicate a dream like performance and kept the same music at the background. Characters: Kate – Narrator Laura – Echoing voice Janine – The other mother Abby – Lighting Behnaz – Sound Scarlet – The real mother Tammy – 2nd Echoing voice Alex – the other dad  As a whole group we liked the idea of our second performance as it was something different and new but we found our first performance more effective and successful as we had a very strong character (the mother) engaging the audience and creating mood! We could make our second production more successful by possibly having the characters speaking over the voice of narrator as its indicating a dream! Overall I think our group did well as a group and used good ideas to create a strong performance!