Theatre Workshop - Outline of Our Play - First Half

We talked today about the order that our play was going to run, how it would work and what each section was about. We started by saying that the first half of our performance is going to be all about moral transgression and breaking your moral code. We are going to start with the audience in the room and all of us waiting outside. There are going to be two projector screens at either end of the room and each audience member will be given a piece of paper and a pen. Then, pictures of some of us from the class will come up and the audience will have to write down on the piece of paper what words have come into their head that describe what they think about them. They will be told that their piece of paper wont be seen, however the people who's pictures have been displayed will walk in and read them out.

We are doing this to get the audience to break their moral code by getting them to judge people before they get to know them. This will make them really think about their morals and make them realise how easy it is to break them. This exercise will effectively start the audience thinking about their morals and how strong willed they are not to break them and get them to think about what happens when they break them.

We will then have Sarah and Tom performing their Meisner exercise to show how their emotions change and vary in the course of a relationship. They're looking at the first meeting, trust, infatuation, mistrust and finally loathing.  By exploring all these stages of relationships, they have been looking at all the different emotions you go through and the morals you have to keep in a successful relationship. This will get the audience to feel the emotion and make them think even more about how their feelings are portrayed and how they react to one another.

Once they have finished, the rest of us come in and perform the Lust vs. Fear exercise we first did with Emma. We had to pick a partner and use eye-contact to stay connected to them and to stay looking at them as we all walk around the room. We then have to get closer and closer with our partner and do the kissing exercise, where we get so close to kissing and then move away. We did this a couple of times and then got really close and stayed there. We have included this in our piece to make the audience see the longing we have for this other person and the infatuation we feel when we're around them. This really effectively shows how to make the infatuation and how badly the man in, "The Flea" wants to kiss the girl, but without being allowed to. It makes the audience feel his longing - as long as we can make it feel believable.

We then go through different stages of some of the animal courtships we looked at and devised. I was with Alex and we had to be swans, but put into humanistic traits - entwining their necks into each other. We performed this for the class as a kind of dance, moving towards one another and changing the position of our heads. Will said that we should become even more entwined with each other, so our bodies are writhing all through each other, as if we can't get enough of them and we have to be with them. So we started pulling each others clothes, going through each others legs, playing with their arms, their back and entwining ourselves to try and become one.

After the kissing exercise, the animal courtship ritual we started with was biting. We all had to bite each other and really sink our teeth into them. We used this exercise because we want to show the audience how in love these people are and how much they have to be with each other and inside each other. We then did the entwining exercise, we did this to show the audience how badly they wanted to become one person. We then did spitting. This involved us spitting on ourselves and wiping it on and offering it to the other person to smell. This would show to the audience how in love these people are, which is how the man feels to the girl in, "The Flea" and how he is offering himself to her. We then looked at play-fighting. We did this to convey to the audience how playful and free a relationship can be, but also how it portrays to the audience how the relationship of the man and the woman in, "The Flea" works and how the guy is playing with her, by flirting with her and teasing her.

We then have the "kiss fight" with Jack and Laura. They reject their partners and go to find each other. They kiss and we all look on in jealousy. We then run towards them and try to split them up. We lift them into the air and make it look like the bond between them, and their love is too strong to separate them, until we finally separate them and lower them to the ground.

We have done this "kiss fight" to show to the audience how easy it is to break your morals of staying faithful to a partner, to not be jealous, to not to try to hurt other people by ruining their happiness, but also allowing them to feel the longing that the man feels in, "The Flea" and allowing them to see the power love can have over so many people.