Towards the end of this section of work we had a chance to perform a polished piece on the subject of handicap. This is the piece of work I have chosen to focus on. We were exploring the issue of someone who was young, successful, and had everything going for him or her and then lost it all. The main character in the piece was a successful popstar called Shiva. She had a great career and a boyfriend who she loved. But one day after a performance at TOP OF THE POPS she got home and found her new cat dead and a message on her answer phone from her boyfriend telling her that their relationship was over. She gets very depressed because of all the bad news and turns to drugs. She injects herself until eventually goes unconscious and is rushed to hospital. The drugs cause nervous system default and Shiva loses the use of her legs. The piece ends showing her in a home frustrated that her career has come to an abrupt end. She becomes mentally ill and cannot accept what has happened.
Throughout the piece I played many different characters. At the beginning of the piece I was the presenter of TOP OF THE POPS, Tommy Klein.
The character was presenting the programme and introduces Shiva to perform her No.1 single, Hey Mr. DJ. Then later in the piece I was one of the hallucinate images of Shiva’s brain when she was injecting drugs. We used a method called physical theatre where three of us surrounded Shiva, who was in the centre and used specific movements to surround her and acted as her out of control mind. While this was happening some music was playing, by MOBY. The music was good for this part because the only lyric was “Why does my heart feel so bad?” which was what Shiva’s character was feeling. After this scene, when Shiva was in hospital I was a news reporter, reporting on Shiva’s drug overdose. The last character I played was a nurse in the home Shiva was living in, the character was quite young, once a fan of Shiva. Each of the characters I played were all very different, and worked well because for each I changed the way in which I portrayed myself, and the way I spoke.
The development of the piece came quite easily as each scene was quite short and had few lines in it. We decided our characters by deciding which of us in the group could do certain things. The characters I played needed different accents and needed to improvise some dialogue. I’m confident doing accents and improvising dialogue wasn’t a problem for me, so those parts were chosen for me. Another member in our group, Rose, is confident in her singing and dancing, so she played the part of Shiva, which required some of this. But when Shiva was disabled and lost the use of her legs, Rose had to be very careful because she couldn’t move her legs at all, and if she moved it had to be in her fake wheelchair. All of the characters were portrayed in the right way and I feel the actors playing them personalised them to make them unique.
Each of the scenes in the piece used one piece of equipment, which was a block. This was used as a stage for Shiva’s performance, a hospital bed, a raised area when Shiva fainted, and a wheelchair. It was quickly moved round in between scenes. Below are some diagrams of how each scene was set out.
Scene 1 = TOP OF THE POPS
Scene 2 = Shiva’s home
Scene 3 = Hospital
Scene 4 = Nursing Home
When we performed our piece to the rest of the group, the audience responded well. Everything was clearly said, no one made any mistakes and the message we were trying to put across was picked up. The message was that Shiva had at all, that her whole life was of many people’s dreams.
But Shiva was insecure and turned to drugs. This caused her to lose the use of her legs and because of her self-destructing ways, her dream of being a famous singer for the rest of her life, was over.
We used few props for the characters in our piece; microphone for Tommy Klein and Shiva, and a tie for Shiva to strap round her arm so she could take drugs. If I were to go back to this particular piece I would do a few things differently. I would take out the hospital scene and replace it with a scene where a neighbour of Shiva finds her unconscious and calls 999, and an ambulance comes and takes her to hospital. I think this would work well because it adds tension to the piece and makes the characters of Shiva seem more personal, someone the audience can have some sympathy for. Another thing I would do differently would be the physical theatre scene at Shiva’s home. I think it could be more effective if some dramatic lighting was used, such as strobe lighting, because it would make it look more chaotic. Apart from those two things I wouldn’t change anything because the piece was quite unique in the drama group and it had a clear message.
Towards the end of this section we did some forum theatre where two parents were being told their son was paralysed. Each person who played the parents had very different portrayals. Some chose to deny what was going on others just broke down. The whole group helped to develop each character in different ways.
Overall I enjoyed this section of work, because it dealt with issues I’m interested in.
