Review of a Live Devised Play - Essay Example

Review of a Live Devised Play One of the devised performance recently was entitled Eat Me, by Phill Dunning, Mark Esaias and Ellie Harrison. Some parts of the performance includes humor, some wry observations and something that smells like self-indulgent improvisation. It actually falls within the context of being poorly done.   All throughout the performance, the most obvious theme is the desire for other person and the ever loyal chocolates, which the performers used to have some audience participation. Though, it seems that the interaction was not able to gain its intent. These consist of giving away bars and reading to the audience, which is not really effective and informative.   Most of the time, the humor is dropped accordingly, but the lines are somewhat long to be considered as a punch line. Some are just too hilarious for the performers but is, needless to say, boring or irrelevant to the audience.   The opening was quite interesting, wherein there is a debate at a plush hotel room, wherein the scene was too long, the interest of the viewers seems to fade until the last minute, where this was cut by a transvestite dancing slowly. Though, the slow dance was taken as a chance to hand out the luscious chocolates, perhaps as a reminder of their central theme.   It is notable that the performers are endowed with comic talents. They should have chosen to use a more suitable platform for this talent. Most of the audience are somewhat enthralled by the inside jokes that the performers come up.   The performance always goes back to the position where chocolates and laces are the most important. There are also some scenes that mostly focus on getting a partner that loves chocolates as well. The performance also employed an experimental narrative approach which was combined with the canny and humorous background of the performance. Thus, it was not very effective due to the fact that it added to the disorderliness of the whole performance.   Thus, if I were to interpret the performance, it was not able to achieve a lasting impression on the audience. I think those who watched it last June would not remember it very well today. Drama Devising Although Sylvia Plath wrote approximately seventy short stories, only ten were published in her lifetime. Since her death, three appeared in popular magazines and an additional seven stories were printed in the recently published volume Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. What is interesting to the reader of these twenty stories is the consistency with which Plath dealt with the same materials and themes throughout her fiction. Her prose works span over ten years, much of that time seems spent in writing and rewriting the same story, the story which reaches its fruition in The Bell Jar. This is particularly obvious in several of the short stories published after her death (" Tongues of Stone," “Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men," and "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams"). These stories, along with "In the Mountains" (published in the Smith Review, 1954), serve almost as apprentice pieces for key scenes in The Bell Jar, containing episodes with the same actions, characters, images, sometimes even the same words. Beyond these apprentice pieces, however, a reader discovers that not only do Plath's stories stylistically show her direct movement into the writing of The Bell Jar, but they also mirror her continued thematic concern with two interrelated ideas: first, the idea of living and sustaining a life of the imagination, and second, the socio-mythic form of this theme, what Josephine Donovan has called "the sexual politics of Sylvia Plath." She wrote her short story “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams." This first person narrative is composed in a voice that approximates the one she would find for The Bell Jar a voice, that is, rather than a style. It whirls in a high‐ trapeze glitter of circus daring around one of her most serious terrors: her experience of the electroconvulsive shock treatment that jumped her out of the torpor in which her attempted suicide had left her. Perhaps "Johnny Panic" was the divining work that located and opened the blocked spring. Change of home and travel prevented her from writing anything more till late fall. Then almost at once, with a place and a few brief weeks to concentrate, she made the first big breakthrough in her poetry. "Poem for a Birthday" returns to that stony source, but now lifts the shattered soul reborn from the "quarry of silences" where "men are mended," and where her "mendings itch." And the voice of Ariel can be heard clearing its throat. Johnny Panic, the superhuman, demonic force in "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" ( 1958), exemplifies this on-call Dark Prince who can admit the narrator into new realms of being. He is a bizarre confluence of masterful lover, the creative unconscious, and death. The narrator, a secretary in a psychiatric hospital as Plath herself was at this time, describes him thus: "Well, from where I sit, I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all—it's the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep" (JP, p. 152 ). While Johnny Panic is immanent and ubiquitous, he is also, like Leonard in "Stone Boy With Dolphin," "stony as Everest, higher than Orion" (JP, 160 ). Moreover, as a kind of collective unconscious, he provides a source of creativity: "Call the water what you will, Lake Nightmare, Bog of Madness, it's here the sleeping people lie and toss together among the props of their worst dreams, one great brotherhood, .." (JP, p. 155 ). This fantastic figure rescues the narrator from a fate worse than death. Finally, to "keep from facing the gaping void in her own head of which Harold had made her so painfully conscious" (JP, pp. 208 -209), the wife dons her "favourite princess-style emerald taffeta evening gown" and overdoses on sleeping pills. Harold returns to find her dead, but "her tranquil features were set in a slight, secret smile of triumph, as if, in some far country unattainable to mortal men she were, at last, waltzing with the dark red-caped prince of her early dreams" (JP, p. 210 ). Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams looked into a first person narrative. The book offers a personal touch of the characters wherein the writer describes the settings and the characters in a non invasive way. The book also opens its way to linking the world of dream and the reality of a person. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams offer the negative and positive sides of fear. Relatively, the book explores the diversity and extent of the human mind. In order to produce a beyond remarkable interpretation of the book, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, it is quite imperative to construe how the character feels, and how the situation in each of the episodes are felt. What we would like to focus on remains in the fear that the character feels, how it affects the development of thinking of one person. The interpretation should be able to create a sense of fear to feel fear. Or how it should be avoided, up to the extent of obsession. It should also feel how fear can be positive enough to push one to do better in everything that one does. How the surroundings would be influenced by the thinking of one. There should be the element of surprise as well, that makes the audience keep thinking what would happen. The audience should also be able to feel more connected to the character, its development and identify where they think it would be going. Drama Devising The performance for the Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams seem to be pointing to the direction of interpreting it, using a deep theatrical strategy. It aims to take the interpretation of the subjective consciousness of the main character. It is worthwhile to include the thin line of reality and imagination of the main character. It should be able to inculcate in the audience the image a person threading the line of existence and subsistence. A conventional narrative would be more appropriate given the complex identity of the character. The character is deep and spontaneous, so a conventional narration would provide more clarity to the performance. There should be three aspects thoroughly considered in looking at doing a performance. These are the process, the composition and the performance. Through these three the production is able to create a lasting and hopefully successful project. The process deals with the day to day rehearsal, which should not be fixed and thus, need not be stagnant and dull. The process should take into consideration the flexibility and improvements that can be done. The invariables of the process includes research. This is where the piece is scrutinized and undergoes intensive investigation. Another phase of process includes training of the body (regular activity). This is where there is an activity that the group carry out on a regular basis. Documentation of all these activities should also be included. A duly updated and clear documentation is a way to monitor the progress of the group. There should also be evaluation, to decide whether these are good developments that lead to the group’s success. Whether there are important decisions about the next step, these should also be taken into account. As the process continues, the group should provide strategies for the next step, and the direction where the piece and the group would go next.  The second aspect is the composition. The composition very well defines the production as a whole. It includes all the persons involved. These ranges from the costume to the props and the actors. The composition should consider everyone in the group. The piece should be considered by all the members of the production. It is a collaboration of artistic ideas and their interpretation. The third aspect which reveals the performance as a whole. The performance requires the characters and the piece. The piece would not be finished after the performance because is opens the piece to new interpretation. Thus, new interpretation would lead o the development of the character and the piece. The performance serves as the gateway to new evaluation, how the characters experienced each role. And how the roles are interpreted by others. These interpretations fall not only on the characters. After the performance, the evaluation is also dependent on the audience. Hoe the audience perceived the theme, the ideas and the issues presented in the piece. In drama devising, it is recommended that at one point, the group can carry on the rehearsal and the regular activity without the keen guard of a director. This creates a sense of participation for everyone which in turn results in the sense of ownership for everyone. The group will be able to function as one. For dramatic techniques that are used strategically to challenge domestic realism, therefore, are those that we are able to identify as resistant to the linear and linguistic patterns of formal and ideological closure. You may also find it helpful to further an understanding of the dramatic conventions of realism and techniques of potentially subversive rule-breaking, by looking at a range of representative realist dramas authored by men in the same period. You may then be able to compare and contrast the ideological implications. Robert McKee, author of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (New York, 1997), told interviewer Don Oldenburg that the “screenwriting impulse” is heightened because “movies have emerged from the shadow of the novel and stage play as the premier storytelling medium…. We finally realized film is the defining art form of the 20th century. People’s love of it, their understanding of it, grows with every decade, and their appreciation of the art of screenwriting grows, too” (The Washington Post, February 10, 2000). Therefore, one should understand the “anger” of screenwriters. The Art of Adaptation turning fact and fiction into film, Henry Holt and Co Warner Marina (1995) From the Beast to the Blonde, Vintage Devised Performances you have seen, particularly in reference to the ways these performances told and presented stories, what kinds of dramatic structures they employed. Did they use straight forward narratives or more experimental approaches? Luke Jenness, the venal park guide and protagonist in "Above the Oxbow," also written in 1958. This is one of her few stories told from a male viewpoint, and Plath's inability to maintain that viewpoint contributes to the story's failure. "Above the Oxbow" ostensibly concerns Luke's overcharging a young woman visitor (an actual incident in Plath's life), but the story's viewpoint oscillates confusingly between the mean Luke and the angry girl. In addition, an authorial vindictiveness distorts Luke's characterization because he serves simultaneously as a symbol of male destructiveness and as a lightning rod for Plath's self-hatred at her own failed suicide attempt. Consider, for instance, the following passage describing Luke's facial scar, a scar corresponding to Plath's own suicide scar: "The raised scar running diagonally from his right eyebrow across his nose and deep into his left cheek showed white against his tan. According to Alison Andrews (1997) companies devising theatre at the end of the twentieth century are addressing changes brought about by the socio-political and cultural climate of the time. The preoccupations and changes in attitudes of today’s society are reflected in both the form and content of devised theatre. An ‘instant’ culture prevails in the late 1990s, demanding quick satisfaction for consumers as they move from one new product to the next. Computer access to the Internet and information technology dominate both work and leisure time. A lack of continuity emanates amongst funding bodies and their various applications, alongside a need for increased written justification of every artistic project and its financial implications. The performance products of the devising process are a direct response to changing times, particularly changing patterns of funding (or non-funding) of devised theatre, as well as changing attitudes to gender. Stapleton argues that the seemingly natural relationship between women and devised theatre in the 1970s (arising out of a climate which encouraged women to find a voice together through the collective, democratic process of devising) is not exclusive to the 1990s, where the political climate promotes the individual who operates in relation to wider issues. Women’s interest is in working with a writer, a script and with other artists. Women are no longer only motivated by ‘women’s issues’, but demand work that is driven by what they want to do. It is interesting to note that in 1997 The Sphinx is the only fixed-term funded women’s theatre company in England. 5 The Sphinx (formerly Women’s Theatre Group) has not devised theatre for a long time, but is centrally concerned with promoting and nurturing women writers/playwrights in their own right. Sue Parrish (Artistic Director) argues that women writers working with devising companies in the 1970s often wrote with a specific brief, for example, equal pay or women workers in a factory, rather than the subject of their own choice. In the 1990s there are more opportunities for women writers; opportunities of choice which have long been available to men. In the cultural climate of the early 1990s, the term ‘devising’ has less radical implications, placing greater emphasis on skill sharing, specialisation, specific roles, increasing division of responsibilities, such as the role of the director/deviser or the administrator, and more hierarchical company structures. This is evident from the changing practice of those professional companies who began devising theatre in the early or mid-1970s, and have altered the nature of their work for a number of different reasons. The politics have moved on; women want to do more than just develop projects with other women. The demand is for greater opportunities, for women to benefit from these changes, as well as being integrated into mainstream culture as artists in their own right. In the 1970s, devising was a way of working which enabled women to collaborate together; to find a voice for themselves, and to be part of a movement preoccupied with radical change. In the late 1990s, however, gender is, for many companies and individual artists, no longer the main issue or theme; focus has shifted to the process of making the work. In 1997, there appears to be far greater interest in working with a script as a basis for performance, as well as in working with men. Scarlet Theatre, for instance, is no longer keen to promote an all-female image in the outside world: Works Cited Aston, Elaine ‘Past Tense, Present Tense’ in Feminist Theatre Practice, Routledge, pages 102-121. See also Part 3, “Gender and Devising Projects”, pages 1999 Huxley, M. and Witts, N. (eds) The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, London: Routledge. 1996 Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts (edited by Ted Hughes). 1977. McKee, Robert Story: structure, style and the principles of screenwriting Propp 1998 Thames and Hudson Foreman Richard, ‘How to Write a Play’ in Huxley and Witts 2002 European Master of Theatre Work in Social Fields. Cited in http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:NJbgUEd8zZQJ:www.twisfer.org/download/CURRICULUM.doc+devising+methodology,+theater&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=15. downloaded January 13, 2008.   Read More