To help us explore the character of Netti from the colour purple the whole class did an exercise called Role on the wall; this was basically outlining the characteristics of Netti that we knew from the text and writing them down on post its and sticking them on to a body outline of Netti, then we also put onto post-its questions that we would ask Netti if she existed, so we could find out more about her. We did this exercise to help us get to grips with the character of Netti and this allows us to be able to play her better, and allows us to know her character better.
To help us understand the character of Winston better we did a verbal brainstorming session where members of the class simply told everybody else what type of person they thought that Winston was, people in the class room found this difficult because we weren’t given enough information about Winston in the extract.
To help us try to understand what Winston was going through we also did role play of scenes of us being tortured mentally and physically, when we did this we used cross cutting, freeze frames and slow motion to depict mental and physical torture.
We also did a role play of Netti’s mates and neighbours sitting together and talking freely about Netti and Harpo, this exercise managed to bring to light some of the classes personal views about the matter of what was going on between Netti and Harpo, this helped a lot in allowing all of the other students in the classroom to understand the characters of Netti and Harpo in a lot more depth, because it raised the idea of two different sides to the argument e.g. the side for helping Netti, or the side that justifies what Harpo is doing to her.
We not only explored the character of Netti we also had to explore the character of Harpo we also did this in detail but maybe not as much detail as we used when we were learning about the character of Netti.
We explored the character of Harpo in role play; the teacher split the class up into two groups and then told us to act out a night out with Harpo’s mates at the pub. Both groups showed him to be quite aggressive and both groups also showed him to be quite timid and quite person, which was the whole idea of it.
We also explored the character of the man questioning Winston in the extract he is known as O’Brien. We explored his character using the role play technique we used earlier for looking at Winston’s character.
