All actors portrayed totally different characters, all of which superb and unique. My favourite was Alex. Her role was quite simple, there was no real stereotype she could follow yet the depth of Alex and her problems she held within her made me have empathy for her. The actions were kept to a minimal but the facial expressions showed exactly what Alex was thinking and feeling. I could tell from the start that she loved her mother but didn’t have the means, time or patience to look after her and that she thought her mother would be better off somewhere that she could be look ed after properly.
The character’s naivety of falling in love with a married man and thinking he would leave his wife was a shock because the character seemed as though she was intelligent and level headed enough to listen to her brain. So I thought this was especially good. I also liked the end where she exploded up at the rest of them. It left me speechless, as I wasn’t expecting her to do that. I felt mortified for Alex because her world had been turned upside down. I picked this actress because although she wasn’t the most noticeable, the complexity of the character was shown throughout and she took me through so many emotions.
COMPARISONS: THE RESPONSE PHASE (summary of work)
1. Investigating the title: ‘My Mother said I never should’ we looked at the nursery rhyme. I knew gypsies were once tarnished with the same brush as paedophiles. So my group and me explored this and made a short piece showing children listening to their mother and not going off with the strange man wanting to take them away. 2. We got into pairs and noted down the structure of the play. We wrote down the waste ground scenes separately. We briefly explained what happened in each scene. We discovered the nature of the play was episodic, as the plot unfolded. The waste ground scenes reinforced this and the themes. There were references to symbolism and Brecht.
3. We researched, in groups, either set or costume, I chose costume. We looked at the play to find the ages of the 4 children when they first appeared in the play and the time periods. We looked at typical clothing from the time periods relevant and matched it to the description of the character’s clothing. We drew models of each character, fully clothed, and wrote notes of each part of the costume.
4. I worked with Danielle, David and Lauren. We investigated act 1, scene 1 to develop the 4 characters. We then made a performance to the group and were hot-seated in role. I feel we spent too much time talking and failed to get into the characters properly by developing them through acting. I prepared for the hot seating which helped me, but I found it hard to come up with things to say and remain in role. Here we used hot-seating to try and get some depth of character, role-play so we would really feel and act how the character would, and marking the moment with thought tracking to understand what the character thinks behind the physicality of human contact
5. We used a stimulus (ring-a-ring-a-roses poem) to make a short piece. We decided we were going to do our piece based around World War 2. We used various drama techniques including marking the moment, mime, tableau and thought tracking I played a little girl at the end and I had a monologue to perform. I wrote it myself and I thought it was really good. I tried to put feeling into it and thought how I would feel if I’d lost my father. We used various drama techniques including tableau, thought tracking, role-play, crosscutting, and marking the moment. These helped to link in the plot and create an atmosphere. We told the story of what happened in the war and the effects on the families who lost loved once.
6. I worked with Hailey, Lisa and Danielle. We explored act 3 scene 1 so to establish Doris and Margaret’s relationship, jealousy and the underlying secrets of what they say and what they actually mean. We used thought tracking to develop the subtext of their conversations and to understand the character better and their feelings towards one another. We found they avoided talking to each other about what’s really going on in their lives. Our thought tracking was rather powerful at the end because the last lines of speech were said with the thought tracking. We felt it was the only part in the scene where the characters were saying what they meant so the thoughts said it as well to emphasize this. That was my idea and I was shocked at how well it came across.
7. We went to see the play ‘In flame’ which I really enjoyed. It helped me with the ‘My mother said’ work. It also gave us something to compare in the evaluation. They used many interesting techniques. 8. I worked with Danielle, Emma and Laura. Mrs Chicken put us into groups and gave us each a monologue, mine had Jackie’s. We had to highlight the underlying thoughts and reasons behind Jackie giving up Rosie to Margaret and how she really felt about doing it. We used thought-tracking to get to Jackie’s true feelings and tableau’s to capture the main points where Jackie was finding it tough to bring up Rosie and the events that lead up to her giving her away. Emma read out the monologue and the rest of us acted out the sub-texts. I think I worked well with these people and I enjoyed the assessment. My ideas flowed easily.
9. The teacher lead a discussion about the last waste ground scene and its connections with the scenes before and after it. We found that the first waste ground scene showed Jackie being the boss but in the last one she’s by herself and we realised that it coincided with the normal scenes because Jackie was out of the picture at the end of the play. 10. I worked with Emma, Lisa, Lauren and Laura. We used the idea of solitaire at the end of the play and the key texts from act 3 scene 7, to illustrate Keatley’s idea that a mother urges her child onwards to success and the child progresses a step further from their mother.
We wanted to show the progression of the 4 characters from their mothers with Rosie being the most developed. We played the characters as solitaire pieces and the characters stepped over their mothers to show the gradual progression. We left Rosie to win and interlinked the people actually playing solitaire and winning with her character. We played the final scene at the end because in it Rosie is trying to figure out the secret to solitaire and, as we wanted to show Rosie figuring out how to be the most successful and beating everyone else in life and in the game. (I.e. becoming the winner).
