My Oral assessment revolved around how I would direct a modernised version of Romeo and Juliet based on Act3 Scene 1 to a contemporary audience. There were various strategies we used to develop on gradually coming up with a dramatic imagery of how we wanted the play to physically look and feel.
I generally enjoyed this section of the Romeo and Juliet Coursework, as I found it easy to adapt my GCSE drama skills, English skills, Literature skills into one oral assessment. To initially prepare for this exam I basically, watched as many Romeo and Juliet versions of the film as I could, read the whole play and did as many notes that I could
Substantially, we first read the original Shakespearean play of Romeo and Juliet. When I read the play first time I just thoroughly read it to the best of my ability and each scene and act would write a fair amount of notes to signify each section. This made the play much simpler to understand, and to relate to. Managing the old English was fine, as I do theology and work on the Bible a lot. Therefore, the old English wasn’t as hard as it seemed. I also wrote down powerful quotes from the play that I thought would be relevant to the oral assessment. However, I did analyse Act3 Scene 1 more than the rest of the acts and scenes, as in this particular task was more crucial.
There were many processes used to help me complete this assessment. As I had missed a few of the stages, I did a lot of individual research and received help from my own sources, through the circumstances that I was facing. Quickly doing notes and brainstorms was the most easiest as I found doing this helped me map out what I was going to say to my teacher if she asked me certain questions.
I had been given a set of questions before-hand in order, that I understand what type of questions where going to be asked during the oral assessment. This made my brainstorming easy to categorise. I did the brainstorming mostly on the questions I thought would be likely to be fired at me. Such as, “why is act 3 scene one important?”.
The characters in the play were more signified to me once I watched the films etc ‘William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet with Leonardo D’icaprio’. As in the play, you cant read their body language you can only simply judge by words. Thus, watching the film when actors and actresses were playing the part it was easy for me to make an imagery in my head of how they would be and how I could put them into the 21st century. Throughout analysing the films, I did many notes on how the film directors tried to incorporate drama theatre into the films. It was very interesting to see the way they converted drama and English literature into the films and what era they were made in.
As the whole assessment was about putting Romeo and Juliet into a modern re-enactment I looked around my area and London nowadays and looked at the major changes and the major similarities. Through looking at cross-fading I found my ideas through the use of drama, imagination and English literature. The combination is a good one as you can use a lot of emotion however, use a lot of cool theatre effects.
Overall, the preparation required for this assessment was used and done in an extensively adequate way.
