How did the work of established and recognised theatre practitioners, and/or the work of live theatre, influence the way in which your devised response developed?

16/10/12

We are studying the rehearsal techniques of Brecht, who emphasised emotional distancing and not making theatre too emotional, therefore this influenced our decision to explore the idea of making our performance a series of smaller narratives with different characters, because if we all change roles relatively quickly and we have a diverse range of characters, then both the actors and the audiences would not identify too much with the characters, as the main point of our piece is to entertain and amuse rather than to get the audience to empathise with the characters. This is also one of the reasons why we thought it would be a good idea to make the characters archetypal, or at least slightly exaggerated.

26/10/12

We have used Brecht's method of 'stepping into' our characters, which involves standing in neutral, or as ourselves and then physically stepping forward into a position that our character would be in. We plan on using this method throughout the rehearsal process because Brecht's methods of distancing and an actor not becoming emotionally attached to their character will be helpful to us as we are all playing multiple roles and the style of the piece itself is not naturalistic, therefore using Brecht's methods will help us to easily change characters and also ensure that our acting style is not too naturalistic, because the piece is supposed to be bold and farcical.

12/11/12

As part of our Unit 4, we are studying Lysistrata, which is also a broad, farcical comedy with a style that is not naturalistic, and contains archetypes. This influenced our understanding of how farcical comedies work and the performance style that we need to adopt, as the characters need to be performed in an exaggerated and almost ridiculous way, as the characters we created were too naturalistic before. The fact that we were able to study a farcical comedy script made it easier for us to create our own, as it helped us with understanding the kind of comedy, for example innuendo and shocking jokes that is needed for farce.

26/11/12
We took the characters of the posh and ditsy girls out of their scene and hotseated them in order to help the actors gain a better understanding of how to play them. This is a method used by Stanislavsky, as he believed that taking the characters out of the given circumstances would give the actor a better understanding of the character outside the scene and therefore it helps them to make the character more truthful. Although our piece is not naturalistic and generally we have followed more Brechtian methods, we still need a good understanding of the characters in order to make them believable, even if they are exaggerated. Hotseating the characters was helpful as it gave the actors more ideas for lines as well as a better idea of their characters.

4/12/12
We performed the 'secretary' scene a few times with new lines, then did a speed run of the scene. We thought that it would be a good idea to do a speed run because it would help us understand the rhythm of the scene better and also the comedy works better if the action in the scene is relatively fast paced, therefore performing it at an exaggeratedly fast pace would make sure that we put a lot of energy into the scene and also gave us the chance to play around with the comedy more. This was not a naturalistic way to rehearse this scene.

11/1/13
A couple of plays have given us ideas and helped us to create our piece; our exam piece last year was 'Can't Pay, Won't Pay' by Dario Fo which is a farcical play where two women convince their husbands that they are pregnant, when they are really trying to hide stolen goods. The most inportant way that this influenced us as we were creating our piece, is that it showed us just how far we could go with a ridiculous plot while still being engaging and somewhat believable, therefore it gave us the confidence to make the characters more exaggerated and more comical. Also 'Can't Pay' was extremely fast paced, so much so that it was almost exhausting to play the part as the characters literally had to run across the stage at points and there was a lot of physical comedy, therefore it reminded us of the importance of having a really fast-paced plot, especially seeing as we only have 5 or 6 minutes for each of our scenes, and this will also make the scenes funnier. Also one of the main themes and messages of 'Can't Pay' was political, and it addressed the issue of poverty, which inspired us to try to address some social issues in our own piece, as we realised that it would not affect the comedy if we did, which is why we included the scene where two teenagers steal from their school, as we wanted to highlight the stereotype of teenage criminals.
As a class we went to see 'One Man, Two Guvnors' which is another broad farcial comedy, and it helped us realise just how funny it can be to use over exaggerated characters. For example, in the first scene in our piece there is a waiter, and to start off with, it wasn't a particularly funny character, but after we saw 'One Man, Two Guvnors' we saw that there was a waiter in that and because the character was old, doddering and fragile it was funny. The character kept on falling down the stairs and getting hurt unintentionally, and we thought that we should make our waiter character more over exaggerated. We did not make the character old or frail, but we thought it would be funny if the waiter was really involved in the characters relationship and kept dropping his tray to add physical comedy. Also, all of the actors were extremely physical with their characterisation, which reminded us to make our characters as big as possible, not just with voice and facial expression, but with physicality as well to make the characters funnier and also more recognisable as stereotypes.
Although we have not seen it, Caryl Churchill's 'Love and Information' did help us when we were deciding what form to make the piece, as we were not entirely sure that a montage of different scenes would be too confusing for the audience, but we found that Churchill had recently written a play that was literally hundreds of short scenes, all related by the theme of love, which is essentially the same structure of our piece. This gave us more confidence to explore this idea, which was relatively new to us as we are more used to creating a piece that is more naturalistic and has one linear narrative. Although, in Churchill's play, the characters names are not mentioned, which gives the piece a more Universal feel to it, and although we want our piece to be easily identifyable for the audience, not knowing the names of the characters is somewhat sinister and would not really be suitable for a comedic piece, especially as some of our comedy comes from the names of the character, especially the illusive 'Trev' who is mentioned in every scene, but is never seen by the audience. Churchill seems to take a Brechtian approach in the play as the lack of name is a classic example of the 'Verfremdungseffek' as Brecht believed in alienating the audience from the characters in order to focus of the political message of the piece, rather than getting emotionally involved, as we learnt when studying 'Lysistrata' in the other part of the course. Although our piece is a comedy, it does have very unusual characters for the audience to decontruct. Also, we did also use Max Stafford-Clarke's idea of Transitive Verbs to figure out the exact intent of the characters in every scene, which was helpful for us because although Stafford-Clarke developed the idea so that the performance would be more truthful, we used it to quickly identify the emotion and intent of the characters so that we could slightly exaggerate it, to make the audience understand it easier.