Week 29: Sarah Kane

Researching Sarah Kane

Sarah Kane is the other play write that we are studying for our contemporary unit and we discussed her in class and I also did some research about her outside of the classroom. She was writing between 1995-1999, up until she died aged 28 in 1999. She came from the Royal Court Theatre, which pushes new writing and at the time of her debut, she was at the forefront of a very visceral and explosive type of theatre. The theatre was shocking to an audience and the language that was used was similar to Berkoff but very dis-similar in terms of the themes which for Kane were more socially orientated. When the play that we are studying, "Blasted", was first reviewed, it was particularly slated by some critics, because they claimed it to be immature writing, a series of explosive actions just to make the audience react in a certain way. Although this could be seen as a fair point, there are many things in her writing that are interesting and the fact that her plays are still being performed nearly 20 years after they were originally written says something about her writing. A reviewer coined the phrase, "In-yer-face Theatre", that has been associated with this type of theatre. It's not a style that she created and then set to follow but it's the style that many people use to describe her theatre. The majority of her plays deal with themes such as love, sexual desire, pain, torture of both the physical and psychological nature, and death. They have an almost poetic intensity and include the exploration of theatrical form and her earlier work also includes the use of extreme and violent stage action. She originally wanted to be a poet, but decided that she was unable to convey her thoughts and feelings through poetry. She once wrote that she was attracted to the stage because "theatre has no memory, which makes it the most existential of the arts...I keep coming back in the hope that someone in a darkened room somewhere will show me an image that burns itself into my mind."

Blasted was first produced in 1995 at the Royal Court and then produced again in 2001. It was a very controversial play of its time and was fiercely attacked in the British papers. It was later seen to be making parallels between domestic violence and the war in Bosnia, and between emotional and physical violence. An assistant director of one production suggested that "the argument is made through form, through the shifts in styles throughout Blasted. That's how she constructs the argument, by taking this setting in an English Northern industrial town and suddenly transporting the action to a war zone." The critical realism that the first scene sets up is literally blasted apart in scene two. A critic once said that "for Kane, hell is not metaphysical: it is hyper-real, reality magnified."

We talked about the synopsis of the play and found that it was based around the character of Ian who is dying of lung cancer and the first scene includes him and Cate who we suspect has a mental condition due to her actions and body language that is described in the stage directions. Ian is depicted as racist, homophobic and misogynistic through his language and attitude towards others in the play, especially Cate. He abuses his position as the older man in the couple and projects his thoughts and opinions onto her. Ian becomes completely disillusioned by the horrific lengths that humans can go to in both his life as a journalist and also in real life. Ian is left blind after a visit from a soldier and he essentially becomes reliant on Cate. Cate is young and innocent in comparison to Ian. She is naive and her occasional stuttering reflect her nervous disposition which is back up when she passes out when she  is overwhelmed or intimidated. Her youth makes her a representative for the more progressive views in society and she retaliates when Ian uses racial slur or anti-politically correct language. Cate seems unfazed by the horrors that are being described outside the hotel room  and she is even willing to escape the hotel room and venture into the war torn outside world. Her progressive outlook makes her more socially aware than Ian and by the end of the play he is completely reliant on her and she becomes the one in the position of power.

After reading through the play we started discussing the language that's included and mainly from Ian. The language that Ian uses is quite shocking at the beginning of the play and then the audience almost become accustomed to the way that he speaks. There has been a gradual increasing of intolerance for racist language from the time in which the play was written and so the audience may not find the language as terribly shocking as we do at this day and age. It would still be language that the audience may not come across very often but it wouldn't be as shocking as in our modern society. The events that happen throughout the play seem to never end in terms of shock factor as each event seems to be the worst thing that could happen yet there are more scenes to come. It's almost exhausting to the audience in a way who are watching it for the first time as there are so many extreme event being shown onstage and it can be quite draining. At the end of the play, there is almost a breakdown in the style of the play and it is beginning to feel like the scenes are getting shorter and the events are getting harder to keep track of in a logic timeline. Part of that fracturing is due to the passage of time and in one way not much time has passed at all but its feels different because of the suggestion of the different seasons being mentioned in the stage directions.

The end section of the play where we see Ian in different positions around the room could reflect his deterioration throughout the passage of time and it is almost a review of the play in shorter scenes. When the lighting switches from blackout to full lights very quickly yet methodically, it could show the pain that Ian is in being by himself and possibly reflecting his blindness at this point in the play. It almost goes through all of the different needs of the human race and the base survival instinct of man. It looks at human nature as there is sexual drives, emotional response, regret, fear, need for food and then at the end death as thought it is a type of relief yet you keep going and when the rain pours on his face and he realises that he is still alive it's almost like he has done all of these things just to want to die. The play could be focusing on what violent conduct does to society and what war does to society. Possibly commenting on how sometimes we are set apart from that in the west and it's presentation in a very extreme way and when you come to the end of play, we see a small act of kindness from Cate and she is being a good person to this character who seems to have been engineered for the audience to dislike.

In comparison to Brecht, Sarah Kane appears to potentially want the same message to be taken from her work that the audience need to change how they act about certain issues in the world yet they both present it differently onstage. Brecht focuses on the political aspects that are behind the conversation and events wheres Kane focuses on the social effects that events can have and how we act with other in response to these major events. It has been said that Kane made no reference to the struggles that she was going through mentally and since her suicide, audience's have noticed connections between her life and her writing. When Kane was discussing Blasted in an interview, she mentioned the haunting newspaper image of a Bosnian woman hanging from a tree that emphasises the start of a civil war. Some say if it weren't for Blasted "In-Yer-Face" theatre wouldn't have had the impact that it did in the 1990s. James Macdonald, who directed an array of Kane's play says that "the media painted her as a wild axe-girl, but actually she was far more theatre-literate than most writers of her age. To shake it up a bit - with an ambition and urgency and passion that's often lacking. She wasn't just symptomatic of the 1990s - what was refreshing was that she was up to something different from most of her generation. She was writing about politics in her own way." As for Brecht, he was writing in the early 1900s and so is influences were different to Kane's, especially since Brecht was writing when the Nazis were coming into power and he was actually on a wanted list because his writing was so anti-Nazi. Clearly the two writers have different influences meaning that the styles and the topics of the play will be different but they both wanted to provoke the audience to question their lives and perhaps cause them to question their actions both past and present, whether that be socially, in terms of Kane, or politically, in Brecht's case.

Week 28: Improving Our Country's Good

https://youtu.be/EipA7-L9MIU

We used the whole of this weeks lesson to focus on the scene from Our Country's Good that we would be performing next week. Due to us only performing a snippet of the play and not having a full range of props and costume that we could use, we had to discuss what the set was actually going to be like and the costume that we would wear if we doing a full scale production of the play.

• Flags- Flags were used to show that Great Britain was deeply involved in the transportation of these convicts and that needs to be made aware to the audience that the society and rule that we live under, did play a part in the cruel handling of these people.
• Center Table - Currently we are using two risers to replicate the idea of a banquet table that would have stretched down the centre of the stage and would be filled with an excessive amount of food and alcohol. This is to highlight the idea that these men, who have caused so much pain in terms of their actions towards the convicts, are now gorging themselves on food that could be given to the convicts who are starving due to the lack of food they were given on the ship/
• Uniforms - All officers would be dressed in full military uniform with badges of the British flag on the sleeves and all their medals on show. We would have chains and keys hanging from their belts to highlight the control and power that they hold over the convicts.
• Set - We would be under a canopy outside a big mansion or meeting house because one of the characters makes a comment about the stars and so we would be eating the banquet in a public place almost as a declaration of the power that they hold.
• References to convicts - There are particular lines that indicate towards the convicts and we wanted there to be a physical representation of the convicts onstage and so we thought that we could gesture to an outline of what could look like convicts working off to one side. This is emphasizing the idea that the convicts are being worked and treated so cruelly whilst the officers who have authorized that are eating and wasting food.
• Placard - We would have a placard at the front of the stage with "Authorities Discuss the Merits of the Theatre" on as it was another element to Brecht's theatre to help accentuate the "V effect" or the distancing method that allows the audience to focus on the political message at hand more than making emotional connections to the characters.
• Last line - The last line of the play is "The last word will be the play, gentlemen" and wanted to respond to that line in a bigger way as at that time, making grand statements that were slightly philosophical made you look more intelligent and intellectual. So we thought that the rest of the officers could see that and appreciate that in different ways, some by raising their glass as though in a toast and others with verbal agreement.
• Marriage - During the scene there is a comment about why two characters in "The Recruiting Officer" get married and Ralph comments that they got married for love and then to confirm wealth. We wanted to make this a point about the societal expectations for marriage in the time that the play was set and so we all reacted to "love" in a kinda of disgust and then when Ralph confirms that they did it "to secure wealth" then we responded in a more positive manner.
• Lighting - Due to use being outside and because there are reference to the stars, we thought that it must be late at night and so the lighting needed to resemble that and we thought that we could have lamps both around and on the table to show that it was later in the evening.

Week 27: Gestus and Our Country's Good

Gestus

At the start of the lesson, we had a short discussion about the elements of Brechtian Theatre that we had found out about last week. This also gave us the opportunity to feedback any research that we had found out about Brecht and his style. Majority of what people had found out was the same as me and so we had the chance to talk it through as a group and help everyone understand his style a little more.

We then moved onto talking about the Brechtian style piece that we did the week before as we had done some more researched outside of the lesson and therefore could comment on some improvements with a more educated mindset.  

• Stereotypes. We did use stereotypes in our piece last week, but we needed to make sure that they were all on the same level in terms of accuracy and also intensity. We concluded that sometimes it is alright to have real characters, like Alexis and Connie’s characters, so that they can highlight the idea that everyone is surrounded by stereotypes and it is hard not to get caught up in them. I think that we could use this idea to our advantage especially with the scene being so political and have those real characters express their views in a realistic way.
• Creating process. Whilst we were in the creative phase with this scene, our core thought process probably wasn’t about the political message of the scene, which it should have been, but more about the hierarchy and who was interacting with who, due to the topic that the discussion was about.

Moving on from the scene that we had previously looked at, we started talking about another technique of Brecht’s that we had partially touched on last week which was Gestus. Brecht said that he wanted to pick a scene from any part in a play and be able to pause it and, from that specific point, be able to understand the political motives behind the actions of the characters onstage. To help us understand the idea of Gestus more, we decided to relate it to Stanilavski style, as we have done production in that style before. We compared it to a moment of orientation where you learn the relationships between characters onstage but with Brecht, you learn about the political background to the scene. Or in perhaps an easier sense, a freeze frame. He wanted to be able to see the political arguments that are going on as well as the political motives behind the actions.

We then did a small task in pairs where we thought of 4 things that, if we were doing a piece on slavery, would indicate that slavery was the political message behind the scene. In my pair we came up with:

• Chains. Both the sound of them rattling and the visual reminder of them always being there can remind the audience that no matter what the topic of the scene is there would still be slaves that are being mistreated somewhere in the background.
• Levels to reflect hierarchy. We thought that because there was a clear divide between the slaves and those in power we could make the staging reflect the status of those in the scene. Those who were higher up would therefore have the most power during the scene.

During some of the scenes, there would be a moment of stillness or a slowing down of movements so that the audience would be able to take that opportunity to understand and think about the actions of those in the scene in relation to the political message. The root cause when making a scene or a play in a Brecht style should be what the political message is and making sure that the audience don’t get distracted by their emotional connections to the characters, but they’re still engaged with the performance in terms of realistic behaviour onstage.

We decided to compile a list as a group of different examples of Gestus which we could relate to Our Country’s Good. 

Splitting them into the columns allowed us to recognise that there are many different types of Gestus and we have a wide range of elements that we could add into a scene. We then proceeded to find a scene that we could add clear elements of Gestus to and we found that finding ways to add in Gestus in the actual script was quite hard. We had to think not just about the lines and the characters, but about the props, set and the bigger picture regarding a scene. We also decided to think about putting on this play on a bigger scale than which we would be able to afford and so we decided to use staging as big as “The Tempest” which we went to see at the Barbican theatre in London last year.

In our pairs, we each picked a scene and discussed the staging, props, lighting and characters that we would set up as directors. We chose the scene right at the beginning of the play: “Act 1 Scene 1”. This was on board the ship with the slaves at the bottom of the ship whilst they were witnessing a whipping of a fellow slave. The scene involves a mixture of characters who each speech about topics that are unrelated to each other as they have been confined in a small place for a very long time and it has started to affect their mental health which is evident through the syntax of their speech. We decided that we would have a layered staging so that we could show the idea of a boat and reflect the hierarchy involved between the officers on board and the slaves. We decided to have the whipping taking place on the highest level as that would be on the deck of the ship and so we wanted there to be an almost harsh white light being focused on them. In juxtaposition to this, we would have the slaves on a lower level with quite dark lighting with the slaves only just being seen whilst they are talking. We would also have the British flag flying on the mast on the main deck and have all officers onstage with flags embroidered onto their uniforms to highlight that Great Britain was involved in the slave trade and highlight the disgusting measures in which the slaves were being treated by the officers on board. This is a sketch of what we wanted our set and staging to look like:

Here are some pictures of the other groups staging as well. 

I found the Act 2 Scene 2, which is the last picture, interesting as the staging in which we were discussing had an officer at downstage right and a prisoner at downstage left with Ralph, the officer leading the rehearsal, in the middle. As a director, and thinking of it in terms of Brecht, I would use this to show Ralph trying to form relationships with the convicts that would allow them to listen to him so that the play could go ahead. Having him positioned in the middle of the two opposing sides could be seen as him trying to blur the lines between the two classes of people.

We were then given a series of pictures, and we had to decipher which ones were from a Brecht play and which ones weren't. Included in the pictures was the "Silent Scream" which we had looked into previously and we already knew was from a Brecht play called "Mother Courage and her children." After discussing which ones we thought fit the Brechtian category, we were then told that they were all from a Brecht play called "The Threepenny Opera".

The Threepenny Opera is a "play with music" written by Brecht which is based on an English Ballad opera called The Beggar's Opera. Brecht once commented on the play at a concert performance that "You are about to hear an opera for beggars. Since this opera was intended to be as splendid as only beggars can imagine, and yet cheap enough for beggars to be able to watch, it is called the Threepenny Opera." It focuses on the lives of a group of beggars being lead by Macheath, also known as Mack the Knife, who marries Penny Pechum which displeases her father. He sets out to have Mack hanged and the story evolves from there. It has been performed at the National Theatre and one review said that it included "enduring fascinations and a timeless appeal for the bold satirical strokes of this malleable story of lowlifes, criminality and justice. The particular joy of the Brecht/Weill version, of course, remains its insinuatingly dark musical score, pulsing with brass, strings and harmonium sounds, and rendered here with stunning elan under the musical direction of David Shrubsole for his onstage band." (https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/reviews/the-threepenny-opera-review)

We then split into 3 groups and did a more detailed account of the set and staging for a different scene than we did earlier. In our group we did Act 1 Scene 7 which is when Harry and Duckling go fishing. 

As we were making the set for the scene, we wanted to keep both the political message behind the scene, hence the slaves still being seen, to remind the audience of what is happening on a bigger scale of things and also we wanted the elements of Gestus that we had discussed previously to be involved which is in things like the addition of the Great British flag and the military uniform. 

Here are the other scenes that people were staging:

I think that all of the staging that was proposed kept the political aspects very clear and they all included different areas of gestus.

Week 26: Starting Brecht

Researching Brecht

As we were finishing our last module, we were informed that in the next module which was Contemporary theatre included Brecht and so I decided to do some initial research before hand so that I might be able to understand the style slightly faster and also when we begin to actually work on the style hopefully I will be able to put my prior knowledge into the physical performance. I began my research by searching for a definition of contemporary theatre and I found a website called http://contemporaryperformance.ning.com/forum/topics/how-do-you-define-contemporary that defined it Contemporary Theatre as "hybrid performance works and artists that travels between the fields of Experimental theatre and dance, video art, visual art, music composition and performance art without adhering to one specific field's practice." I then moved on to researching Brecht's methods and techniques. One of the main points that there was a lot of information on was his use of "Verfremdungseffekt" which has no English translation but is known as the "Distancing method." I found a website (http://beautifultrouble.org/theory/alienation-effect/) that described the time period in which Brecht was writing which was between the 1920s and 1940s. They say that "the theatre of his time, like most Hollywood movies now, relied on emotional manipulation to bring about a suspension of disbelief for the audience, along with an emotional identification with the main character. Audience members were taken on an uncritical emotional roller coaster ride, crying when the main character cried, laughing when s/he laughed - identifying with him/her even when the character had nothing in common with them or their interests." This is where Brecht's distancing technique came from, as he wanted to replace this emotional manipulation with something that had a more political background to it. "Rather than investing in or "becoming" their characters, they might emotionally step away and demonstrate them with cool, witty and skilful self-critique." Having the actors on stage almost come out of role, it was allowing the audience to realise that they are indeed watching a performance and he wanted them to focus on "why" the events were happening rather than "what" those events are. The audience almost become morally aligned during his plays as their mindset changes to what they can do to help rather than what is going on in the situation.

Classwork

At the start of the lesson, we were given some background facts about Brecht before we started exploring the style so that we had some ideas of both the time he was alive in, perhaps allowing us to see the meanings behind his style, and also the times in which he was writing his plays, to see whether his writing corresponded with any main events going on at the time. Using Brecht in this module means that we are pushing quite far back in the Contemporary theatre genre as he could also be known as a Historical. During the 1940s was when Brecht's writing was really starting to become known which means that he was formulating his ideas and opinions in the 1930s. We know from previous research that Brecht was German and so the ideas that he must have based his plays off of must have happened in Germany throughout his life.

We did a short task of making 3 freeze frames of what we thought was going on in Germany throughout in the 30s, 40s, and finally, the 50s to help us understand some of the events that were going on in Brecht's time period. We decided that we would make a freeze frame on the Nazis rise to power for the 30s. For the 40s, we decided on the war as World War II started in 1939 and lasted while 1945. And for the 50s, we did about the divide between East Germany and West Germany. We found out that Brecht was a Liberal, or more so a Socialist, and he was living in Germany around the late 30s and through the 40s. Like we had picked out in our freeze frames, Hitler was gaining support for his fascist regime during the 30s and at this point he started drawing out lists of people that were against his ideals and who were speaking out against him. Brecht was on one of Hitler's death lists because he spoke out about his opinions which were against Hitler.
When the war broke out, like we had shown in our freeze frames, it became too dangerous for Brecht to stay in Germany and so he left to live in America where he spent most of his life afterwards. When he was in America, the divide between East and West Germany began and, as a Socialist in America, he was actually called before various committees to answer to claims about him being a Communist and they brought out an array of poems that he wrote that could be classed as having Communist views behind them. He was a political writer and this segregation became his driving force as he wanted to inspire change through theatre.
One of Brecht's famous quotes is "Theatre isn't a mirror that we hold up to reality but a hammer in which we shape it." Showing that Brecht's theatre was much more about the audience watching the play and coming out of the performance wanting to change something and help solve the issue that has been portrayed on stage, rather than watching a performance a getting a large emotional response to it. We brought up the question of whether evoking the audience into wanting to change something could be classed as an emotional response to the performance and we talked about Brecht wanting to argue that what you want to change is a broader political idea rather than thinking about an individual thing that you can do to help change that issue. We used the film Titanic as an example to help us understand this theory more and we identified that the story of the Titanic is based really tightly around and through the story-line of Jack and Rose, which is a love story and truthfully the audience becomes more focused on their story as they become emotionally connected to these two people but, the audience are therefore forgetting about the larger political side of the film. If Brecht were to do this play in his style, he would not on the amount of people that were killed in this tragic event but the class of those people and the effect that it had on the different classes that were on board. It would be seen as a motivation to try and make the audience feel something political rather than emotional. A popular misconception about Brecht is that he didn't like emotion which is a lie because he's not saying that he doesn't want his audience to feel emotions, he just wants them to use these feelings to fuel them to make a change. Linking this idea to his use of the V effect, we can clearly see that this technique was used to make the audience focus on the political message of his play and relate that to something that they could change in their own lives.

We participated in another small discussion exercise where we were given the situation of the time period which was "the majority of the people at this time, went to the theatre to be entertained and there were lots of musical type theatre going on or there were high-brow intellectual realistic theatre going on." The questions that we needed to discuss was "What are the things that you feel you would have to do to a piece of theatre to start people being more politically motivated by it?" and "What would you change about the theatre to make it more political?" We weren't trying to relate this to Brecht's theories, we were just trying to think of our own ways on how we would address this idea. 

We had discussions in smaller groups about the strategies that we would use to move the focus onto the political message.
Some of the ideas that we came up with as a class were:

• Conversations being directed at the audience - So rather than the conversations taking place between characters, we would "break the fourth wall" and use direct address towards the audience so that they would know that this is a play they are watching and focusing more on the relationship between the audience and the issue are arising rather than the relationship between the characters on stage being effected by that political issue. This will also help educate the audience which comes about through a more direct dialectic discourse between the actors and the audience.
• Using plays that are written with a more political intention - This means that we would be able to follow the writer's intentions more clearly and the political message would be clearer for the audience to grasp if the political intention was the focal point originally. These would then enable the characters to discuss the politics of that time as well.
• Drawing attention to the political motivations behind each character - We could have things happening to our characters but we're looking at the political motives that fuel them to make their decisions, like the example of Rose and Jack in Titanic. Instead of it being emotional, we draw attention to the reasons why they are in that situation.
• Satire - It is the use of humour and comedy to expose/criticise people's political judgement. There is normally an element of wit involved as well.

We imagined that we have used our theatre company to create a performance using all of these techniques to put on a performance and we started to discuss how well we think the piece would sell on the box office and we said that people just aren't interested in the heavier topics that we would have brought to light and some people aren't interested in politics at all. If we were trying to mobilise grounds of support to try and politicise the audience, it means that we're trying to focus on a new audience and those are the type of people who are the least likely to come and watch something like this.

Brecht's idea of Spass revolves around the idea of using humour to engage the audience and make them think at the same time. If you are making your audience laugh then they have already made a decision about the piece and are therefore open to thinking about why the events are happening as they have already made a decision on how they feel about the play. Spass was also a way to break tension on stage as Brecht needed to break any kind of tension so that the audience weren't becoming emotionally involved. Spass can include anything such as breaking into song at random junctures, slapstick comedy and even stand-up routines. Before Brecht got to the idea of Spass, he went through a period of time where he wrote the "Lehrstucke plays", also known as the "Learning Plays" which we the idea of working with the audience as a group of actors are they are going to work through the play with the actors guiding them and there would be a moral lesson at the end of it, normally a political lesson as well. As you may expect they weren't very popular and he tried to go into places like the steelworks and they weren't very successful. They are rarely performed today due to their lack of success but they were a key stepping stone for Brecht and the development of his ideas. The key idea is that Brecht's play should be funny and have humorous elements to them, and so Spass is important in understanding his plays and the language involved.

We then moved onto talking about another one of his techniques which was the "V effect" which I had previously researched and we talked about the fact that there is no English translation which has caused many problems. It wasn't something that he invented, it's more a collection of things that he did during his plays which lead to this effect being in people's brains while they were watching the piece. Like, for example, if we were to say "we want an emotional response" that's not a technique that you use, it is the response that you want to happen. Brecht wanted this "V effect" to happen throughout everything that he was doing in his plays so the audience would watch it with this effect going on and it would make them think about the political message instead. It makes the audience tilted their perception slightly at what they are watching and hopefully see it in a different light.

He accomplished this effect by what he called "Epic Theatre" which looked at the form in which the performance is presented and what the audience would be watching. Epic theatre's purpose is to emphasise the audience's perspective on the piece and their reaction to it through the techniques that we have already discussed which forces each individual audience member to react in their own way instead of having a collective reaction. This allows each audience member to make their own opinions on the issue that has been pointed out and therefore throughout the piece will be thinking of that issue in relation to their lives and what impact that could have had on them. Epic theatre also included the use of Historicisation which was used in order to make the audience look into the connections between historical events and a similar event that was happening in our modern world. Plays like "Mother Courage and Her Children" and "The Good Person of Szechwan" highlight issues that were relevant in that time period in relation to another historical event. Also in Epic Theatre, majority of the set that was used was realistic as were the costumes worn by the cast to highlight the reality of these problems and how relevant they are to the audience regardless of their societal positioning. The actors who were involved had to portray a believable character with making the audience think they have become that character. This is where another technique called Gestus comes in. This means that the actors on stage take on the characterization of what is being said during the social commentary. An example of this would be that if there was a character of a housewife, their movements could be very quick and agitated whereas her husbands could juxtapose with that and be very slow and sluggish to reflect there position in society at that point. Actors also played multiple roles to show that everyone was acting and they were told to be specific characters at those points in the play.

After discussing some of Brecht's main aspects, we moved onto doing a short scene where we had one person who came home late, to their partner because they were working late at the office. They were tired and their partner was a little irritated that they didn't call but were okay with it. The last person in the group was to be a child who comes in to say goodnight to the parent who just arrived home. We made a short realistic scene that highlighted the weariness of the father and the frustration of the mother and then we had the child come in at the end to say goodnight even though they should have been in bed. We then show the other group our short piece but we had the added feature of a placard, which was another aspects of Brecht's theatre. He used placard to add to the "V effect". On the placard was "Alexis arrives after a hard day's work, a frustrated Megan serves her food. Connie arrives to say goodnight." The other group that was watching us had to imagine that they were seeing this placard all throughout the scene and afterwards we were discussing that because they knew what was going on in the scene already and what was about to happen, they were watching the scene in a different way. They were more tracking what was going on in the scene and it stopped them being emotionally connected with the scene as they weren't trying to understand what was going on because they had already been told. It's not that the actors have stopped acting realistically but the audience's perception has slightly changed due to them knowing what was going to happen. One things thing that Brecht thought was an issue was the idea that if the story had massive amounts of suspense in it and the audience were looking to find out what was going to happen all the time, they actually get distracted from thinking about why it's happening.This is one way that he used placards, which is to remove suspense from what the audience were seeing by telling them what was going on in the scene.
We then watched the other groups scene and we were looking at a different way to use a placard. Theirs said "Charlotte has been having an affair for the last 6 weeks. The husband does not know." As an audience member, with that use of placard, it added a reason to the way that Charlotte was reacting towards Caitlin and it gives the scene some sort of context without having to spend a lot of time building up this backstory, the audience are just given it. Using placards, can also begin to create a sort of judgement like if the placard hadn't been there, we might have thought about the interaction on stage in a different way.

We then moved onto discussing some other aspects of his work and one of the main topics was structure. In a realistic play, the most common structure is chronological and during the realistic plays that were being performed when Brecht was alive, there setting was in a short span of time, like a week or an afternoon in someone's life. Some plays were set in real life time situations which makes sense if you are performing a realistic play. Brecht opted for a more episodic structure, which is shorter scenes which might be consecutive but they might be consecutive and years apart. So this gave Brecht a chance to explore a whole decade of issues that might be going on in a short space of time. This accentuates the "V effect" because the audience don't have an extended amount of time to connect emotionally with a character, they could see them when they are a child and then the next time is when they are an adult and are married. If we tie in other aspects like being told what is going on, with placards or placards telling you what is going to happen, very quickly the audience's perception does begin to shift from trying to work out what is going on, to working out why its going on. Brecht also liked to use music and songs in his productions, sometimes in the middle of the play and this is clearly a distancing effect for the audience as it has nothing to do with the scene that was just happening. Brecht also liked to use realistic props, but only enough to set the situation up. For example, he would use the corner of a building, made very realistically but the rest of it wouldn't be there. So he would use elements of realistic staging but not whole set pieces which adds to the "V effect" in the idea that the audience would be able to see that it was set that was being used and therefore it was a play that they were watching and not real life. Adding to the idea of wanting the audience to know that they are watching a play, he liked to show the scene changes and the lighting desks as well.

After studying some of the theory behind Brecht, we looked at one of his plays called "Mother Courage and her children." We read through the scene and then proceeded to look for elements of the Brecht style that we had been discussing previously and outline them.

We then began to discuss the scene and we found that the language was colloquialised but if we were to perform it in our modern day, we could do it with an earthy tone to it and the colloquialisms would be able to be recognised by the audience. We then ran through some confusions that may occur with the scene as the language was slightly hard to understand and we clarified that Mother Courage's son was killed because she wouldn't pay the price for him to be released and kept bartering to get the price down. She wanted to bring the price down because she likes to keep hold of her money and she originally was relying on the money from the cash box, that Swiss Cheese had hidden, to get the money to get the wagon returned to them. From this you can sense the Capitalist background as there are many bargains being made and everyone wishes to spend the least amount of money possible. Mother Courage has got herself into this situation as well as her family and her son is in a worse position that she is at this point. She is desperately trying to work her way out of it using money to do that but essentially it doesn't work.

After discussing Mother Courage, we moved onto looking into "The Silent Scream" picture by Helene Weigel, she was Brecht's wife and he gave her all of the main female roles in his plays. They were married about 4 times and she was one of the best actresses of her time. He gave her the part of Mother Courage and the "Silent Scream" was included in the scene that we had just read through in her performance. One thing that is cut out from the picture is the body of her son which is over to the left.

During the scene, she actually had to silently scream because if she screamed out loud then the guards would have heard her and known that this was a result of seeing her son's body. This became part of the "V effect" as it is a highly emotional moment but the audience are distanced by the facts that are surrounding the scene, they can;t get emotionally attached to Mother Courage and they cannot have the emotional attachments to the son considering there isn't much character development on his behalf. At the start of this scene, there is a placard that tells the audience what is going to happen so at this point they were expecting a reaction from Mother Courage but perhaps they did not know to what extent.

Mother Courage is an actual play written by Brecht so we moved onto looking at a play called "Our Country's Good," that is written by Timberlake Wertenbaker, which is a more modern version of a Brecht play. We have previously studied this text, during Director's Challenge, were we had to research the play and use that to direct a group of actors. One of her biggest influences, of course, was Brecht and Epic Theatre. We looked at a scene and read through it and began to see it in a Brechtian way rather than just a text as, in our previous research, we had only skimmed over the idea of Brecht and we had focused on why she had written the text instead of her influences. I did some more research into the text and got some extra background information which may help us to understand the conversation subjects a little more. In the 1780s, convicts and Royal Marines were sent to Australia, hence "the savages" also known as Aborigines, as part of the first colony there. This play highlights the class systems both within the convicts and within the racks of the officers. It discusses themes such as sexuality, punishments, the Georgian court system and the idea of using "theatre to be a humanising force". Wertenbaker actually went to see a play performed by convicts which allowed her to see how they acted with one another and also allowed her to see a play that was actually being performed with people in the same situation as her characters. She said that "the convicts were, at least momentarily, civilized human beings, and they had taken their work very seriously: The convicts knew their lines absolutely because they had nothing else to do and they didn't want to waste time with pleasantries; as soon as you came into the room they started rehearsing. The two hours were very intense because the time was so valuable and we saw immediately how doing a play could become absolutely absorbing if you were incarcerated." In Our Country's Good, most of the characters are based on real people that would have been aboard the ship as Weretenbaker was allowed to read the journals of the First Fleet members in order to portray them accurately.

Here is our interpretation of one of the scenes from "Our Country's Good"

https://youtu.be/sD97oklxqZk

- We used chains to reflect the idea of "the savages" as they are slaves so we had the chains to add context to the scene and the constant noise of them banging together or against the chairs showed that the slaves hadn't just disappeared but these men were just drinking and laughing as though they didn't exist at all. The chains would ideally be fitted into the costume, if we were doing this scene professionally, and we wanted the chains to become the tassels that majority of high ranking officers have on their uniform so that it would be a constant reminder for the audience that they were to blame for the mistreatment of the slaves. We also wanted to include the idea of keys and one of the characters have a large amount of keys on their belt.
- In the centre, the smaller tables are representing a large banquet table that would be filled with an excessive amount of food and drink. Reflecting the idea that the slaves are starving and these men are wasting so much food that could be given to those who need it. And with the added use of forks, the officers use them to accentuate their point and so use them as tools to point with and then continue eating. These props, both the food and the chains, re-enforced the irony of the topics that we are discussing and the language of what we are saying.
- In terms of the delivery of the lines, we are directing some of the lines out to the audience and then some to other characters on stage. Those who opposed the idea of the play have the bigger gestures and bigger movements around the stage to reflect the idea that they are commanding and therefore can project their lines outwards but because of the power that they hold, whoever they are talking to still knows that the lines are being directed towards them. One of the character makes reference to the stars as so the setting must be outside with some sort of slight covering over the food and so the higher ranking characters direct their lines outward as though they were observing the scenery. We wanted to make it clear on which characters were for the play, against the play and those who were neutral ground about the play.
- We did realise that there were two singular characters who were coming across more realistic than the others which were Connie's characters of the Ralph, who was going to direct the play, and Alexis' character, who was the Captain of the ship. We thought that this was based off of the ideas that they were the more calmer members of the group and they were more for the play to be held whereas the rest of the cast were more exaggerating their disagreement towards it due to them wanting their point to be heard.
- The use of stereotypes and stereotypical actions allowed us to heighten the aspect of the audience knowing that this was a play. They also add as an element of social commentary about the opinions that were present at the time in which the play was set.

A possible next step would be to look deeper into the characters of Ralph and the Captain to see whether we can use their realistic nature to reflect a political or societal issue. They could be the voices of reason in the scene as they do try and justify the play being held. Connie's character is the more diplomatic whereas Alexis holds more power due to her status and so she has the final decision on whether the play will go ahead or not. There are also references to people like Rousseau which reflects how educated both these characters are in contrast with mine and Caitlin's characters. We are so against the idea of the play that we begin to stereotype the people that they bring up such as the Irish and the Swiss. Our characters could reflect those who have strong beliefs about the British Empire and believe in everything that they say is what we should live by which, in a modern setting, would equate to xenophobic and racist people who believe that punishment is punishment and the convicts are in prison because that is where they belong. We do not see them as human beings which reflect what the play is about as we are exploring the idea about the morality of punishment and rehabilitation which are the political arguments that are being made apparent for the audience to consider.