The story is basically about a working class woman who works for a wealthy woman, the working class woman has 7 children and she finds out she is pregnant again with twins and her husband has just left her so the wealthy woman persuades the working class woman to give her one of the twins. The two twins meet at various points in there life’s, they meet as young children and become friends when young adults, when they find out that they are twins they both die because the wealthy women kills them both.
To get us to understand the play we read more into it by taking scrip’s from the musical and the original, and developing them by using: Brainstorming We brainstormed a lot about the play, what we all knew about it. We also brainstorm about the different themes of the play, money, dreams, friendship and superstition we then linked them to the play. This helped me a lot because I did not know the full play and this helped me understand the themes and how they connected to the play. Still-image
In my group we created a few still-images to help use decide each theme and to make use understand it more and were the themes come into the different parts of the play. We also created a caption to go with each still-image so that it helps other groups to understand what each still image is about. Narration We used narration at many different times but that was also because there is a lot of narration in the script, the first piece of scrip we used was the first scene in the play, it is Mrs Johnston singing about her children and her husband that has just left her.
We developed this piece by not using the song but by using the song words as scrip, this was a very humorous piece of the play and I enjoyed doing it because it helped me to start to understand the characters more. Marking the moment We tuck some scenes and marked the moment to show important points in the play. We took one piece of script from the play and it was the point when Mrs Lyons was persuading Mrs Johnson to give up her child, we took three important moments and marked them by using a freeze frame and adding a thought track. Role play
We created a role play for Mrs Johnson this was to show what had gone on in the past, example, her husband leaving her, and how these could persuade her to give up her child to Mrs Lyons. This helped me understand the play more because I could see into Mrs Johnson’s past and see what sort of life she leads. Hot seating For this we each chose a character and played that character as people interviewed them, this is so we could get a better idea of how the character is thinking what he is thinking and what he thinks of the outer characters. I developed many different extracts from the play ‘Blood Brothers’.
One of the extracts was the first scene in the play and this was about the mother telling the audience about life and herself, she is basically introducing herself. We developed this scene by adding narration, characters different levels and the movement we also added more text as we took the original text from the song and added the different text to it. The layout was like this: Kr = Kristy K = Katie F = Fabien M = Mark H = Hollie H comes in stage right and Kr comes in stage left they meet in the middle, at this time K, F and m are off stage.
Kr and H are both elderly people and are gossiping they have a conversation about the two twins and open the play up. They are both the narrators at the beginning of the play but it is split between them. As they are talking they both go to sit on the chairs that are on the blocks this creates height and this represents the narrator looking over onto the action as narrators always know what is going to happen. The last line is ‘Bring in the mother, let the story begin’ at this point F and M enter the stage left and K enters stage right.
Then the song is spoken as if they are lines in the play some of the lines are cut out as there is a lot of repetition because it is a song. Some of the lines are spoken by K as the mother and also F as the mother outer are said by Kr and H as if they are still gossiping on the park bench. The scene ends when M goes off with Kr stage right. Initially I was aiming for a comical character, if we had used costume, music and would have had more space we could have developed this scene more. Then we could have a longer and more detailed lay compared to the script as this scene was mostly song.
At the moment when the story was introduced and the mother came in the mood of the play changed the past of the mother was introduced and this was all so we could understand her past. Perhaps we could have added more text into the script or even some monologs and more mime instead of using scrip I would of liked to of spent more time developing the extract of the play. We should have used more height, and marking the moment as there were lots of important points in the extract. Before we started to develop the scene we should have used hot seating to develop are characters more.
