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20^th November 2012

In today’s we lesson we looked more at the ensemble essence in theatre, doing exercises that get us to engage with the skills that we will need to be part of an ensemble and the problems that we might face. We also began to put our political theatre piece together, being given and our individual parts, and starting to block the piece and put it together.

In the script we used many of the Brechtian styles of acting; this helps us to engage with our theatre practitioner and the ways that we should be engaging with our characters and the piece of theatre. This is shown in our piece where we have a number of sections where people are talking about who they are voting for in the elections, and during this time, instead of having set, we the actors become the set, in the form of objects and people. For example in the bar scene, I am the bar, in the office, I am a filling cabinet, in the benefits office, I am in the queue and in the common room, I am a hippy student. These all set the scene to the audience and give the atmosphere of all the different areas of society. Brecht also thought that set and staging should be simple, so by using ourselves as the set we aren’t using complex scenery that constantly has to be moved, also we are reinforcing the fact to the audience that they are watching a play and that everything on stage is a representation not real people or situations. 

Also we are using narrators in our piece of theatre to describe the action on stage and to break down the forth wall between the audience. We are using different types of narration, for example we have the traditional narrators that set the scene and give the audience the information that they need; for example we have some narrators give the audience a background on general elections. This is effective because it gives the audience the information that they need on elections as not everyone is politically aware, but also it gives them the sense that they are part of the an election happening at the moment, because they will be voting and this is the type of information that is given out to people while elections are in place to boost voting numbers. We also are using narrators in a big speech that Blondie does, where she is giving the winning speech outside number 10, the narrators are going to be describing all the stage directions that Blondie makes, for example pushing her hair back or licking her lips. This is a very specific type of narration that Brecht uses as it disengages the audience from the emotions of the play and allows them to know that what they are watching isn’t real. This is really effective for our own piece of theatre as we are presenting Blondie in a really glamorous way in the start, however we don’t want the audience to connect with her because she turns out to be a mass murder. Also she is just a representation how people get into power, how little we can know about them and what they can turn out to be.

Also we are using singing narration were we montage the election campaign to Blondies Song “Call Me”, but changing the lyrics to “Vote Me”, not only is this telling the background of the story in a quick way, it is also putting humour into the show, as Brecht always through that theatre should have humour in it and it puts that in even though our piece has a very serious subject matter.

Then we have the scenes from our play that we are doing: “Blondie” and in between them we are putting the piece of theatre we devised last week on the leaders that have committed crimes against humanity, this allows all of us to play more than one character, so that we don’t get attached emotionally or connected to the characters that we are playing because we should only be representing them. Also it reinforces the message of our piece of theatre because it shows how we, the public, elect people but then we allow then to do horrible things to our country because we believed the facade that they presented. It also builds up to the audience the idea of what Blondie might have done to Britain.