Hello everyone, well I've officially started back at uni so my life is currently manic...I mean, for goodness sake, I haven't even written up my last Rocky experience from the end of September...it's coming soon people. Anyway, if truth be told my Musical of the Month would be exactly the same as last month as I still haven't managed to take the Newsies CD out of my car CD player for more than a day yet (well except for when I crashed my car but that's another story boo hoo). However, that may be a bit dull for me to go rabbiting on about the same show (I know I do it for Priscilla...oops) so for any of you who are interested in this fabulous show here's the link to my last Musical of the Month. But what about this month, well I'm going to cheat and do a play not a musical as the other show that has been completely taking up my life is Adult Child/Dead Child by Claire Dowie.
This play has been monumental to me this past month (well actually for quite a few months) as my friend, Holly, and I decided to put it on at our university. The date we performed was the 10th October (so actually it was pretty near the start of October but hey ho) and, as far as we could tell, people seemed to enjoy it and learnt something from it.
The play itself focuses on a person (who is non gender specific) who is assumed to be schizophrenic and explores the reasons why they have ended up that way. The play raises issues such as lack of love, loneliness, loss of childhood, friendship, parental abuse and mental health; however, Claire Dowie (the playwright) claims she wrote the play about nothing at all.
For our depiction we chose to opt for portraying the play in a in-yer-face style so there was a lot of going up to people as shouting in their faces, pushing people and at one point I went over and sat on a person's knee for five minutes. This seemed to heighten the tension and create more dramatic impact to the play.
We, also, had the audience sat separately and in the round. The separation was so that people would feel isolated and, particularly wouldn't be able to grab onto their friends hand if they became scared; they'd have to deal with their fear themselves, just like the character did. We chose to do the play in the round as we felt this made the audience closer to the play (they weren't just sat in one big block). Furthermore, the roundness of the audience was akin to a brain, which depicted the fact that the play was happening within the character's brain. We extended this thought by chalking words such as 'crazy' and 'lunatic' on the wall so as to show that these were the words spinning around the character's head as it was what other people were calling them; it, also, brought to life the phrase "The writing's on the wall".
Additionally, we based our concept around childhood as we felt that the main impact on the character's life was their childhood. This resulted in the space being strewn with toys from our childhood, including building bricks, toy trains and a very large teddy to name a few.
The highlight, and also the worst moment, of the play for me was when I accidentally pushed one of the audience members a bit too hard and they fell off their chair (ooops). Although I was extremely worried it was, also, very hard to stop laughing and lots of the audience came up to me at the end saying how bad they felt for laughing. Luckily said audience member, who just happened to be my boyfriend (and no I don't usually go around beating him up, I just didn't realise quite how strong I was) was ok and the show carried on quite well after that.
We are now very sad that the experience is over and are hoping to revive it at some point. I hope you have enjoyed reading about my experience of performing Adult Child/Dead Child by Claire Dowie; if any of you have any other topics you'd like me to cover in the coming weeks please comment below or tweet me at @GreenGirlsRox and I'd be happy to oblige (I'm a bit theatre-less at the moment).
Anyway, love you all
Kat
Xx
P.S. Please forgive me of any speling errors as my computer has only just been fixed (thanks to the my amazingly clever boyfriend and his brother) after becoming very infected so I don't have Microsoft Word yet to spell check everything on.
No comments:
Post a Comment