Act Two, Scene Two- The Story

Today we considered how we would act and stage Scene 2 of Act 2, in order to create a clear separation between what was real in the play and what was one of Katurian's stories.
We discussed ideas of altering the set first, including:

  • Opening up the stage with lighting
  • Adding colour to the lighting to suggest a fantasy world
  • Altering set- so for example having a backdrop of some kind that could be turned around to reveal words from the story.

Another way of looking at it was the characters. We wanted to create a sense that the actors playing the parents and the child knew that they were acting in order to prevent the scene from appearing to realistic. We decided that this would work best with exaggerating certain movements but limiting the number of actions on the whole. In the rest of the play, an actor has to be aware of the movement that they are doing all the time, because it is important that they continue to play the character even when they don’t have any lines to say. But we thought it would be best that the characters act out only what Katurian narrates in order to reflect its story like nature.
Originally we considered having Katurian reading from his story. However this later changed because of the scene with Michal, where he tells the story of by heart, but also because his stories are so important to him that we thought he wouldn’t need them written down to remember them. This also allowed us to create interactions between the characters of the story and Katurian. For example, the moment when the little girl blesses Katurians shoe implies that he as almost fallen into the story- which is what we want the audience to feel- and shows that as a writer he has a relationship with the people he has created. In the other group’s version, they chose to have Katurian lead the foster parents on stage. This asserts Katurian as being in complete control of the story as its creator, and the fact that he’s bringing these terrible people into the little girl’s life emphasises to the audience the role he played in the real murders of the children. Although he never actually killed them, he was able to come up with the violent stories they were based off.  

Final Story Scene

In our final version of the story scenes, we decided to have Katurian’s stories as a voice over, similar to that of an audiobook. This gives the sense that the audience is watching the story itself, and prevents the abstract story scenes from mixing with the realistic scenes by having Katurian on stage. 
We also considered using a screen and performing the stories in shadow form. However, it took a lot of work to achieve something very small and we decided that it was unrealistic to achieve in the time we had left. However we have incorporated some elements of the shadows into the play. For sections in the story where he sets the scene or describes things that we are unable to act out we have decided to use shadow puppets on a smaller screen on the stage. So for example when Katurian describes the forest in The Little Jesus we can present the forest on the screen. This also allows us to use black outs for lengths of time and prevents the small sections we act out from appearing disjointed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Three Gibbet Crossroads

The Three Gibbet Crossroads is a riddle. It makes the reader guess the man’s crime, which is supposedly worse than the two others- worse than a “Murder” or a “Rapist. Katurian believes that the riddle is unsolvable, and even says that “ There is nothing worse”. However in Tupolski’s view the man’s crime is that of murdering children, and is therefore another link into the mounting case building against Katurian. The story is a long section of text, and could be confusing for the audience, so it was important to mark out spaces that could be used to suggest certain characters or places. Therefore we had a specific area on stage to show the other two iron gibbets and also the entrance of the nuns. Furthermore, in our version of the play, Katurian should be representative of the man with the unknown crime.   This is Tupolski’s way of emphasising his belief that killing children is the worst of crimes and that Katurian is guilty of exactly that. This explains the italics on “...
Read more

Berkoff Style

Image
This Unit we are exploring physical theatre, acting and the style of practitioner Steven Berkoff. In five mins with Steven Berkoff, he describes how he sees himself first and foremost as an actor, as it allows him to play and experiment with theatre. This is seen in the different influences for his work- Plays such as East and West take inspiration from the poetic style of Shakespeare and plays such as Metamorphosis are adaptions of other writer’s works.   He also takes inspiration from other actors and practitioners. Edmund Kean (1787-1833) performed Shakespeare and had a flair for melodrama. This may have had an impact on the exaggerative style of Berkoff. Jaques Le Coq and his pupil Claude Chagrin studied alongside Berkoff. Le Coq’s use of mime, movement, masks and ensemble are all characteristics that can be seen in Berkoff’s work. Berkoffs style almost works to strip down a work and centre it on movement and experimentation of voice. He places these two things above th...
Read more

Emily Positive and Work Positive

Emily Positive We decided that we would flow straight from the club scene into the montage of Jack and Emily’s relationship, helping to separate them through the use of a music and lighting shift into to create a distinction between the two. We thought that a montage would be the best way to show the development of their relationship and build a connection and understanding of their relationship with the audience. By doing this we thought we could make the audience more invested in the relationship so that in the final scene, the argument and ending of the relationship would have more of an effect on the audience. In this way they would be able to empathise more with Jack. We picked out key moments that we could use to make repeating motives, such as the meal and Christmas memories where they both shared a drink together as well as the engagement and the final scene where Emily would give back the ring. Work Positive We wanted to develop Nasifa’s character and also change th...
Read more