Drama Coursework - Evaluation Of Live Performance

Blood Brothers by Willy Russell Evaluation of live performance On Thursday 12th of February 2009, we went to the phoenix theatre, Charing Cross road to watch the musical "blood brothers" by Willy Russell. The play Blood Brothers is about twins who were separated at birth by their mother Mrs Johnston, who would not be able to cope with even more children. She was working as a cleaner for a rich lady, Mrs Lyons who can't have babies so she persuades Mrs Johnston to give her one. As they grew older, they meet and even through the disapproval of Mrs Lyons become friends. However they fall in love with the same woman and this conflict ultimately leads to their tragic deaths. I enjoyed the starting scene as it started as a freeze frame of the ending scene where the brothers died, there were only lights in the background shining like stars while the rest of the stage was in darkness. This added to the sad, emotional mood of the scene, all you could see was two dead bodies lying in the dark with all the other character standing around looking down on them. Then as the other characters gradually left the stage and the police took away the dead bodies the spotlight came on the narrator as he introduces the play. The live production of the play was entertaining and some spectacular acting performances bought the play to life. Craig Price - who was playing the narrator was one of

  • Word count: 1562
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Drama
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Choose a play which you have seen and that you particularly enjoyed. Discuss the aspects which made it so successful = Willy Russell's 'Blood Brothers'

Choose a play which you have seen and that you particularly enjoyed. Discuss the aspects which made it so successful. A play which I have seen and particularly enjoyed is Willy Russell's 'Blood Brothers' which I saw on 15th March 2006 in a matinee performance at the Wolverhampton Grand. The audience mainly consisted of secondary school children and OAP's. The audience's reception to the play was extremely positive and they gave a standing ovation at the end. The genre of this play is a mixture of comedy, tragedy and musical theatre. The context and influences of this play are that it was written by Willy Russell (who is from Liverpool where the play is set) in the early 1980's. During this time Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and there was mass unemployment, something epitomised in the song "take a letter Miss Jones". The play is epic in that it spans the lifetime of the twins. Costume was used to create character and show each characters class and status within the society of the context. For example Mrs Johnston constantly wore an apron which showed her poverty and low class in strong contrast with Mrs Lyons who was much more extravagantly dressed in a cashmere jumper and pearls showing her wealth and high class. Costume was also used to show age for example Linda wore a little girly dress with her hair in bunches when she was a child, then school uniform with a

  • Word count: 999
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Drama
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Blood Brothers- Part 1 Drama Assessment

My Practical in October 2004 was a piece of scripted work and was for option 2. We showed this in the style of physical theatre. My group and I performed a section of the play "Blood Brothers" which was set around the 1960's in Liverpool and was written by Willy Russell. The main themes behind this play are superstition and family values. I will compare and contrast "Blood Brothers" to another play of a similar method called "Blue Remembered Hills" and is also written by the same person. The play starts off with a young lady, not very well off, called Mrs Johnstone who has seven children and two on the way. However she can only afford to look after one more child otherwise the social services will take some of her children away. Well in the end she is persuaded by her boss, Mrs Lyons, to let her keep one of the babies, but Mrs Lyons doesn't want the children to grow up knowing about each other due to a superstition and therefore shuts Mrs Johnstone and the other baby out of her life. Later on in the story the two children meet (not knowing they are brothers) and become close friends, but Mrs Lyons doesn't like the fact that her child could find out about his real mother and that he has a brother and decides to move out to the country. Throughout most of the show the two brothers keep meeting and form a strong friendship between nevertheless the bond between them

  • Word count: 1098
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Drama
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Blood Brother: The Review.

Blood Brother: The Review Blood Brothers opening scene began with a confusing but moving scene which began with the eerie words of the narrator spoken in a Liverpool accent giving a bigger impact on the mysterious narrator of the play who was played by Keith Burns. It kept me excited and interested throughout, with moments, which made me jump in shock as well as emotional points, which made you sympathise with the actors. Willy Russell, the writer of Blood Brothers or also wrote Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine and Stags and Hens other successful plays. Blood Brothers was Willy Russells only musical, and many people scoffed at the thought of the concept working. However, Russell had the last laugh as Blood Brothers has now been running for years and has won numerous awards including an Ivor Novello. Blood Brothers opened in Liverpool in 1983, before subsequently moving to the West End, and is now shown at the Phoenix Theatre a beautiful venue for such a terrific performance. Our seats were in the box, too the left-hand side of the stage. Before the curtains went up I was a little worried as we were so high up it was like looking down on the stage and it made me but I was also disadvantaged as I could only see one half of the stage properly. And this meant that some of the actions on the left-hand side of the stage were difficult to view. Once the play started though it

  • Word count: 1089
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Drama
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The beautiful lie.

GCSE ENGLISH UNIT 2 Eva Chen January 04 THE BEAUTIFUL LIE Sam looked out the window of the plane as it flew over Beijing. The clouds merged into one another brown by the wind and they separated afterwards. This made him think about his mother and father. Now he needed to leave a home that provided him with warmth and had given him a sense of belonging, he needed to separate from his mother and father. When he thought about this, he couldn't prevent the tears falling his face. He didn't want to leave his home, which he had lived in for 21 years. Suddenly ray sunlight went through the clouds and shone on his face. Like the sunlight, he still had some hope even through this was the first time he had visited England. He could meet his brother who had been in England for 6 years. He was going abroad to study art in Cambridge. This was his entire dream. His friends admired him for his bravery in going abroad and at he can lucky to be able to afford it. Sam's brother-David went to Cambridge for his university 6 years ago. Then even though his family was not rich, his mother and father were teachers, but they the importance of education, they borrowed money from their relatives and friends to let their son study abroad. David didn't disappoint his parents. He always got the music awards from school. And now he was working as an opera

  • Word count: 1471
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Drama
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Comparative Essay - Blood Brothers & Annie

Joseph Kingham Drama - Part One Comparative Essay - Blood Brothers & Annie Within this essay I intend to evaluate and compare the similarities and differences between two devised thematic scripts intended for performance to an audience. The two scripts I have chosen to compare are Blood Brothers, as originally written for and performed by Merseyside Young People's Theatre Company, and Annie, as performed by Hill House St Mary's School Doncaster, 2007. I shall begin with a basic outline of each story, and the way in which it was intended to be performed. Blood Brothers is a tragedy, a tale of love, brotherhood and class set in Britain in the 1980's, which highlights the economic turbulence the country, and especially the working class, were in the midst of in this period. It begins with Mrs Johnston, a humble working class Liverpudlian, who falls in love and marries. Unfortunately the man she falls in love with is false and deceitful, and leaves her after impregnating her with what they believed would be their eighth child. In contrast, Mrs Lyons in an upper-middle class happily-married woman who, due to unfortunate biological barriers, is unable to conceive. Mrs Johnston, in a brave attempt to provide more for her burgeoning family, begins work as a cleaner for Mrs Lyons whilst her husband is away on a nine-month business excursion. All is well until Mrs Lyons

  • Word count: 1539
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Drama
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During our discussion about how 'blood is thicker than water', we all participated in an exercise that involved role-play to explore the phrase. A boy was placed in the middle of the room

25th January 2006 Drama - Draft 'Cold Blood' Coursework * What did you discover about 'blood bonds' during the Value Consortium? * How did thought tracking help you explore different types of bonds? * During Cold Blood, how did the idea of the divide and bonds play an important part in the role-play? * What explorative strategies did you use? How did they develop your understanding? During the Value Consortium, I discovered from the subject of 'blood bonds' that in my opinion, blood is thicker than water. The way that I gained this opinion was by a discussion that the whole class had about what we thought about the phrase 'blood is thicker than water'. 'Blood is thicker than water' simply means that families are more important than friends. The discussion began by a piece of paper being placed on the floor with the phrase on it. We were then asked to sit close to the statement if we were fifty-fifty in our opinion about it, to one side of it if we thought that water was thicker than blood and to the other side if we agreed with the statement. Most of the class, myself included, went to the side were they thought that family was more important then friends, giving the argument that family will always be there for you, friends come and go. Fewer members off the class, about three out of thirty, went to the side were they thought that friends were more important than

  • Word count: 809
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Drama
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The structure of 'Blood Wedding'

The structure of 'Blood Wedding' has a great influence on its continuous effect and final impact. Lorca carefully plans the events of the play in order to create a final dramatic climax. The play is split into three acts and the action is divided into each act. The opening act is a basic introduction to each of the characters, complexly explaining to the audience their given circumstances. In the first scene the audience have a lot of literal information to absorb, therefore the use of symbols is kept to a minimum until the characters can be easily identified. In Greek tragedy this would be refereed to as the prologue. Following the light introduction, Act 2 mainly revolves around the Bride and the wedding and introduces the complications that arise. In the fist scene it is the wedding day and Leonardo tries to persuade the Bride not to marry, as to him it appears obvious that she does not really want to. However, the Bride forces herself to do so "And I'll shut myself away with my husband, and I'll love him above everything." (pg26). Soon after their marriage, in Act 2 Scene 2, the Bride leaves the wedding ceremony and her new husband claiming that she has a headache and needs to lie down. However it is discovered by the Brides father that she has eloped with Leonardo. Act 3 is perhaps the most dramatic and eventful act; in the first scene the major concentration is around

  • Word count: 1731
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Drama
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Aristotle could be considered the first popular literary critic.

/ Aristotle could be considered the first popular literary critic. Unlike Plato, who all but condemned written verse, Aristotle breaks it down and analyses it so as to separate the good from the bad. He studies in great detail what components make a decent epic or tragedy. The main sections he comes up with are form, means and manner. For most drama and verse, Aristotle's rules are a fairly good measure of the quality of a piece of written work. In modern day however (modern meaning within the last century), certain changes in the nature of dramatic writing have started opening a gap between Aristotelian criticism and what is actually being produced on the stage. Changes in values and techniques brought about by Stanislavsky and some leaders of the popular feminist movement have shifted the direction of theatre. In light of these changes some of Aristotle's rules are not applicable anymore. That is not to say that they are not sound. They simply do not apply. Sharon Pollock, one of Canada's great female playwrights and a strong leader of the popular feminist movement, is one example of a writer that breaks Aristotle's mold. Her play "Blood Relations" sits on the edge of what Aristotle would call tragedy. Aristotle states that the form of tragedy is an "imitation of a noble and complete action, having the proper magnitude" (Aristotle 6). Here we have Lizzie

  • Word count: 1577
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Drama
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Blood Brothers

Blood Brothers Response For our response part of the coursework, we were asked to evaluate and describe three pieces of drama that we had done based on the Blood Brothers class work. In this drama we had been asked to do a symbolic movement or a symbolic statue, to show either social class, divided wealth or prejudice. We were asked to give our symbolic movement or statue a title. In our group we did a symbolic statue based on divided wealth. The title of our symbolic statue was "They were divided by wealth, but came together by destiny", we had this title because it was related to Blood Brothers the play itself. The title of our symbolic statue described how Eddie and Mickey had been separated due to wealth and money problems, but however they came back together by chance and destiny. In our symbolic statue, we had three people standing to the right, they symbolized the upper class. Then we had a gap in the middle and then three people kneeling/begging on the other side of the gap, they symbolized the lower class. The proxemics in the middle of the stage, separating the upper and lower class showed the boundary between the upper and lower class and it also showed the boundary between their wealth. In our symbolic statue, we didn't have any middle class, which showed that there was no way for you to get from lower class to upper class, it showed that you could only be

  • Word count: 1448
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Drama
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