For this project we shall be working from a brilliant script called "The Wardrobe" by Sam Holcroft. The piece is about a wardrobe, and the secrets that it keeps, we travel through five centuries looking at different characters and different eras, the play not only helps you to understand what it was like to be a kid so many years ago but it address the issues of each specific date.
After reading the script for the first time I really liked the sound of Benjamin in scene two, it looks at the time period 1633 in England and how it was forbidden to be Jewish, the scene shows two boys learning Hebrew in the Wardrobe, one of the brothers Daniel skipped school and went to the market and "unearthed a treasure." It was a banana, now I liked this scene because it was quite funny how they act towards the banana.
But later I went home and read the script a second time and I really liked the sound of James in scene 9, the wardrobe is now in a Catholic Boarding school in 1888 and is used to store the robes of choir boys, now this scene not only is shocking and gruesome, but ends on the wardrobe protecting a darker secret. In this scene James is a very enthusiastic to listen to the details of a murder that has happened, he is with his friends inside of the wardrobe and they are listening to Tom read out the newspaper, as he reads on later you understand that he is talking in fact about Jack The Ripper, at the end they are all caught inside of the wardrobe, but Tom is the only one who has to stay he repeats "Please don't leave me in here with him." Which in its self is quite a chilling thing to hear from a young boy at a catholic school, I like this scene because its quite funny in the middle but the end of the scene really gets you thinking and wondering.
Now the scene I finally settled on, was a scene that in actual fact I was trying to avoided reading for, this was the scene between Antony and Nell, scene 10, it is about a couple who are engaged, but its during the time of World War 1 and so Antony has been conscripted to the war, they are both looking for a wedding gift and they come across the wardrobe, there are some funny comments made by Antony, and eventually they get into the wardrobe where Nell express her feelings about them trying to forget about the fact Antony is going to war, and that's when Antony basically marries Nell in the wardrobe, now the bit that really gets me is the fact Antony swears that he will come back and they will dig out the paper that they signed and then they will take it to the mayor and have it sighed, well in one of the original scripts the people in 2014 dig out the piece of paper, which means he didn't come back and that he may have died. I like the scene because it can be made into such a beautiful piece that can still later have an effect on the audience.
For most of this week we read lines for the play to get a feel of what characters we wanted to play, but we did an exercise about statues, and how you can raise or lower them, which is great from the scene between William and Jaffrey. We got into partners and walked past each other, each time changing how we walk to see if we can raise or lower status, eventually we moved onto a small set of lines between a employer and an employee, the employer is basically firing the employee, but we played it different ways we looked at whether they would stay the same the whole way through, or whether it changes depending on what is being said.
During week two we didn't do a lot different from week one, which is why im incorporating it into week ones blog. This week was mainly sorting through parts, we looked at every scene so that we could get a feel for all the characters, William and Jaffrey are now two girls Winnie and Genevieve, and the last scene with friend one and two, have now been changed to two boys. We have all our parts now, and I am pleased to say I got the part of Antony, and I have also got a second part, which I look forward to exploring in the future.
