Public, Human, Victim Exercise and devising tasks

Public, Human, Victim Exercise and devising tasks

To understand the multifaceted side of politicians, as Amanda is a politician, we explored this by creating three short scenes showing a politician as a politician (public), a human and a victim. My group decided to focus on the education side of politics, particularly the act of making exams and grade boundaries higher and more vigorous for the younger generation as this has affected us all.

PUBLIC:
We devised a television broadcast of the news where the scene is handed over to a correspondent interviewing a politician on his views on the educational system. Elliot portrayed him as completely for making school exams harder stating that the youth of today "don't care" or "don't work as hard" as they spend too much time drinking and having racous fun so the new education system will make them work harder, learn discipline and care more.

HUMAN:
The second scene was a flashback to a time when the politician was young and bombards his hard-working studying friend with temptation, music and alcohol. Progressively he persuades all of his friends in the scene to "party hard while we're young" and get drunk and forget about exams, insisting that they will be very "easy".

VICTIM:
This last scene shows the politician at home with his wife and children who are struggling with added amounts of revision, exam pressure, deadlines and whether or not they will be able to progress to their desired course due to the decision their father made that exams become harder. He is the victim in this scene as his children are frustrated, worried and resentful towards him due to his decision, making the politician upset and regretting the emotions he has inflicted upon his school students and his children.

These scenes we created show a different politicians frustration, other than Amanda, due to a different cause (education) as we don't know the cause for Amanda's worry.
We developed this by further by adapting to make it more similar to Amanda in the fact that the politician is doing something very human, such as taking a bath, and add ensemble narration of different voices of various emotions to show the complexity of worries being endured.

Location: We chose our location for the politician to be the toilet because it is simple and a realistic place used by all people everyday which is also meant to be private. Using a private location is very important to us as it accentuates the lack of personal space and relaxation politicians can feel they have. This relates to Amanda as she is trying to have some private time but feels as though everyone from her work and all the decisions she is making are following her home form work and into her bathtub and similarly we wanted to construct this but in a toilet.
We chose to continue our focus on the theme of education within politics as we all feel very passionate about this subject which will affect our devising process positively.
Roles/ensemble: The politician (played by Angelica )walks into the bathroom and sees a mirror reflecting her which is the guilty side of herself, puts herself down and telling her her decisions are wrong (Elliot).  The other ensemble voices form the rest of the bathroom and the politicians varying thoughts as the sink (Rebecca) is the failing daughter, the toilet paper (Callum) being the man who can't be employed as he has failed his exams, the flusher (me) being the voice of all students taking exams and the plunger (Seamus) being someone who had to retake their exams again and again.

We all took it in turns to say lines to the politician and would push back every time she tried to ignore us by saying things like "You can't just flush this away" and "You can't wash this mess from your hands". This helps create irony as she is on the toilet and helps clearly illustrate where the politician is based as we are having minimal furniture as we want the audience to use their imagination as Brecht did. Although it sounds quite humorous, I think we made it sincere as each negative comment built tension in the piece. We built up the pace and intensity of the piece by creating a soundscape of abuse from the narrators, making him distraught about his work life.
I feel like due to all these things I am coming to terms with Brecht and his acting style more clearly as we are implementing his teachings into our abstract play and devised piece, physically embodying sinks and flushers which contrast Stanislavski's naturalism style. I feel our performance was successful as we portrayed diverse and clashing inner-thoughts of a politician trying to enjoy their personal private life just like Amanda.