After Troy

In today's lesson we looked back over all the pictures and research we had done previously and decided on what location and time period we wanted our piece to be in. Eventually we decided on modern day and an abandoned underground station. We liked the idea of having our piece set in modern day as it makes the audience feel slightly more connected (rather than having the whole piece set in ancient Greece). However, so the audience understands where our piece was supposed to be set (to make the characters names make sense), we will have Greek graffiti on our set. The abandoned underground setting causes an uncomfortable and eerie atmosphere.

After we decided our location, we began to create our prologue. We wanted our prologue to display the carnage during the battle of Troy and the depression of the women of Troy. We wanted to show how times changed for the women during the war.


-We decided to perform our scene to 'Nightmare' by 'Avenged Sevenfold'


Our scene began with Lorna, Kat and Hope walking into the middle of the stage holding rolled up sheets (symbolising a baby).
One the first double bass trill Ollie Kelly and Charlie run to Hope and pull the sheet away from her, then on the second and third Ollie M and Lewis then James and I run in and pull the sheet away from Kat and Lorna.
The girls then separate and run towards the sides and the back of the room, the boys then use their sheets as a barrier and push the girls back into the circle in the middle of the room. We created this to give the idea of them trying to reach for their babies to save them.
To finish off the our scene we created a torture scene for the three girls whilst Lewis and James walk around trashing the room, as if they are destroying the houses of the Women of Troy.  

Dr Faustus

In today's lesson we began to work on the physical theater side of our Faustus unit. We began by working on the '7 deadly sins'. We began by setting our scene, we decided we wanted to have our staging in traverse (like a catwalk). We decided on this staging as we had never tried it before and thought it would work well with our physical theater ideas.
We decided that we wanted Ollie (Faustus) at one end of the traverse watching TV, and we decided to set our deadly sins out like TV ads luring Faustus in. We agreed on breaking each sin down and saying parts of each rather than each person having a sin, as we have 7 sins and 6 actors (excluding Faustus) therefore to make it fair we shared the lines equally.

Our 7 deadly sins include:

• Pride 
• Envy
• Wrath 
• Gluttony 
• Lust
• Sloth 
• Greed

We began with sloth (as it was the first one that came up in the script). We decided to research 'sloth' to find out exactly what it was, so we could act out the exact style of sloth. We found out it was based on laziness. Therefore we agreed on laying on each other, and every time someone speaks, we all move to a new position on the floor 

We began to consider transitions between our deadly sins. Our second sin is gluttony, we decided to have Mephistopheles circling us with food,tempting us to take food )like Gluttony), at this point we would all leap up from our places on the floor and take a piece of food from the bucket and take it away and scoff it. We decided unless we were speaking we would be walking around the stage still eating our food moving like our bodies are so heavy.

Dr Faustus

In today's lesson we received the cat list for our new Physical Theatre Unit of Dr Faustus


Faustus - Ollie Kelly
Mephistopheles - Rhiannon David
Murdock - James Borg-Clancy
Cornelius - Rob Andrew
Valdes - Lewis Fisher
Evil Angel - Charlie Sanderson
Good Angel - Lorna Clark
Scholar - Charlie Sanderson
Lucifer - Lewis Fisher


When receiving Cornelius I decided to research my character a bit more and find out why he is important to Faustus. I found out that he was a scientist (like Valdes) who was intrigued by the underworld and necromancy. It was Cornelius who gave Faustus the information he needed to contact Mephistopheles.
We then spent the remainder of the lesson reading through the script and getting an understanding of what Dr Faustus is about.  

After Troy

In today's lesson we were researching different locations for our 'After Troy' piece. We decided we wanted to set our piece in a more modern time rather than ancient Greece.
Therefore we began to discuss how and where we wanted our piece to be set, to do this we wanted to create a collage of pictures so we can choose where we want to set our piece.

-I decided to go for a horror scene style setting. I chose 3 different location pictures that I feel we should set our piece in, they included:  A Lake, A Forest, A Cave

I chose the cave first, as it was like the setting for the actual After Troy, however I wanted mine to be set in times, therefore we would have a horror cave with graffiti all over the walls. For my lake, I had the idea to set it in a secluded area with mountains. Also my forest was very similar.
I like the secluded dark horror idea, i think it works very well with the mood of the piece we are doing based on the scenes we have done so far. For Example- Our first scene with Kratos and Mestor. Kratos talks to Mestor about turning the oceans black and moving boulders, this is what gave me the inspiration for my Lake picture.

- Other peoples ideas included, a run down town (e.g- Twydall) WWII and an underground.

After Troy

In today's lesson we were split into groups and given a scene from our new script 'After Troy'.
Lewis and I had a scene involving 'Kratos' and 'Mestor'. We discovered from this scene that 'Mestor' was the king, as I was given the character of Mestor. I decided to play Mestor as quite a stuck up character who is quite short with 'Kratos' and expects him to do whatever he wants.
On the other hand 'Kratos' is quite a stuck up character himself, however he's a joker. Therefore Lewis decided to portray Kratos as very sarcastic. Therefore our piece revolved around 'Mestor' bossing Kratos around and 'Kratos' mugging him off. In our scene Kratos is teacher Mestor about the women of Troy.

Commedia De'll Arte

As we have our performance on Monday, we decided to use this lesson to make sure we have everything for sorted. We began with props, we decided what props we needed (e.g- saucepans, plastic cups etc.) and who would be in charge of getting them.
We then moved onto scenes, we decided we wanted to add more scenes into our piece. We decided that we needed more Lazzis to ensure we stuck to the style of Commedia dell'arte throughout our piece.


We went through our scenes and worked out which ones were already Lazzi's, we have 'Olive Oil cocktail' as a Lazzi, we decided we wanted to add another Lazzi as one wasn't enough.
We came up with our 'plate disaster'  scene. This scene included Zanni and Brighella walking around the restaurant. As Brighella picks up a plate from a customer and gives it to Zanni, he licks it puts it back down on the table.

Commedia De'll Arte

In todays lesson we went through our scene list of scenes we wanted in it, what scenes we already had and what scenes we still needed to add.


Our scenes include-

- Tidying the Kitchen
- Prawn Soup
- New Waitress
- Syrup
- Tasty Notes
- Welcome critics
- The Cupboard
- Extendo-fork
- Olive Oil cocktail
- Zanni's entertainment


Currently we only have 'Welcome Critics', 'Olive Oil cocktail and 'Extendo-Fork' left to create.
We have began to think of ideas for our 'Olive Oil cocktail' and our 'Extendo-Fork' scenes. We decided that Harlequin would have created a super long straw to drink apple juice from the kitchen without Brighella seeing him, however she works out quite quickly what he is doing and moves his straw out of the apple juice and into the olive oil.
Our Extendo-Fork scene was a similar idea. However Harlequin walks around the restaurant with an extra long fork and takes food of peoples plates.