The Weekend: Role Play

Role Play in the Haunted Cells

To begin the role play, we received our characters. My character was called Neena and I found out that she was a police officer who got away with brutally beating a man to death. Her motive was that she found out that he had been beating his child up and his wife was so oblivious of it and so she took matters into her own hands and did what she thought was right. 

My starting position was laid on the floor with "blood" on my head and a chair was overturned on the floor next to me. I had blood on my head because I had tried to escape and the masked mad, who was the person that had put us in the cells, had tried to keep me back but I had fought which had led to him hitting me across the head with a chair hence why I was laid on the floor "unconscious."

I was laid on the floor on my own for about 30 minutes before another person entered the room. As I was on my own, I thought about how my character would react to specific other people. I thought about how she would react to children, as she thought that she had saved one and so might see herself as a hero for all other children and so would try and protect them at all costs.

I also tried to think about how she would react to men. She would see them as predators and be very distrustful of them. This reflected how I reacted to the masked man as every time that he walked into a room I made sure that I was on my feet and ready for if anything happened. Especially in the last room that we were all in, I made sure that every time he walked in, I was at the center of the room and in his eye-line at all times. If he ever walked towards anyone I made sure that I also took a step in their direction to make sure that he knew that I was there as a barrier between me and whoever he was walking towards.

I found that I connected with a girl who had been left in a house full of men by her friend. I felt that there was no one to protect her and so saw it as my duty to protect her from anyone whether that was someone she didn't know or the friend that actually left her. When we both realized that we were in the same room as the friend that had left her I found that there was a wave of anger that had washed over me and I felt the need that I had to stand between the two of them at all times to be there as a physical barrier.

By the end of the evening, after we had all been put into a room together, we had to start making decisions on who was going to leave the room and who was going to stay. I made sure that I wasn't the one who was making the decisions because I felt that I was just there to protect people not to decide who was going to be allowed to leave. 

At some points in the room, the masked man was very forceful on some people, for example he forced a Muslim girl to drink wine which was against her religion. I had a fight with myself inside my head because I wanted so badly to take the bottle off of him and get him to leave her alone but on the other hand he had hit me for trying to rebel against him before and so if I tried again there was that feeling that I didn't know what he would do and what extent he would go to, to punish me.

After we had been in character for 5-6 hours, we had to write a paragraph about our character and all of the feelings that we had being that character.

"I beat him, like he beats his own child, his flesh and blood. A small innocent child that has done no wrong in this world. And she just stood there. And watched. I did what I did to protect the child, to save her from him and from his un-nerving nature. What I did was for the child, I was the hero in the fairytale, my own fairytale. I didn't stop. My arm just kept going, taking my anger out on his face, his arm, his chest. He didn't deserve to live. And then I saw her. The mother that didn't lift a finger for her own child. She told me she was looking for a cop. The bitch that murdered her husband. I knew she meant me. I didn't say anything I wanted to see her suffer and pay for what she did. Or what she didn't do. I was going to tell her, honestly. Tell her how I brutally mauled her husband because he's a disgusting prick. I was going to tell her how I was laughing and smiling as I did it because he finally realized the consequences of his actions. I was going to tell her how I enjoyed leaving him there to rot. But I never got the chance and she will never know how I felt. She will be alone with her thoughts, and I will be alone with mine."

I surprised me how in character I actually was because I didn't know that I felt that way about the wife. I also didn't realize how much anger I was holding in the whole night and trying to to take it out on anyone.