Evaluation
When we started devising our practical work our teacher
showed us clips from the film ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’, He then showed
us a practitioner called Antonin Artaud, He created plays based on Theatre Of
Cruelty; This is a surrealist form of theatre. When doing his plays he didn’t
like to base them on causing pain but a rather violent, physical determination
to shatter a false reality.
Our teacher asked us to twist the stories in the nightmare
before Christmas and make them a lot more surreal, just like Artaud did. We had
to make the audience feel uncomfortable. When we performed this it was going to
be in a style called installation theatre. Installation theatre is about taking
over a space and making it able to perform in. The monologues we did would get
repeated in the space we had. To do this we took over the flyovers.
When we were getting all our sources together and our
characters to do with the nightmare before Christmas we would start our
monologues based on our character. When these were done that would be what we
would perform on the night. My character was Shock from the trio Lock, Shock,
and Barrel, Shock was the most dangerous, cunning out of the three she was the
only girl out of the Oogie Boogie mans ‘little henchmen’. During the
preparation for this performance we had to change the whole story, we had to
create two monologues as half way through the preparation we didn’t have a
Barrel. Our first monologue wasn’t very much Artaud style. We then went on to
change a few things and ended up just having a ‘Lock and Shock’ the Doctor in
the movie, Doctor Finkelstein joined our scene so we
had to change our monologues for this to fit in. We did plenty research on the
Moors Murders and based the monologue on that. The monologue for Lock and Shock
was based on Myra Hindley and the Doctor was based on Ian Brady. Lock and Shocks monologue were seen
from two different perspectives, almost as if Myra had a split personality, one
minute she was enjoying what Ian and her did and then the next, she wasn’t.
Lock was explaining how much he enjoyed what they were doing. “This was our
idea of fun, that’s just the kind of relationship we had”. he was also
explaining about how much fun him and the doctor had (this was kind of based on
what Myra said in her statement). Then Shock was saying how sick it was and how
much she just wanted to escape from it all. “He told me if I showed any sign of
backing out, I would have finished up in the same grave as sally”. She was
scared, but wasn’t able to show much emotion as to how she felt, because she
was scared of how he would react.
The difficult aspects of our work
were writing to monologues as we had to change our quite a few times to make it
‘age appropriate’. It took us several times to actually get it right. Our
monologues we based on The Moors Murders too much, we kind of went off track
with the Artaud style. The other difficulty we had when it came to our work was
mainly on the night of the performance and setting up the scene and trying to
make it look ‘scary’.
Our audience said that our
performance was very interesting to the eye. We were heard very well and to say
it was dark we had just enough lighting for them to be able to see us. Our
performance was very Artaud style and made our audience very uncomfortable,
this is what we were trying to achieve.
