The Wardrobe Project (Week 7)

At the begging of the week, we each drew something that we felt represented the wardrobe, I drew a picture of the wardrobe, with key objects from each scene surrounding it, my favourite was one that had the wardrobe, but with lots of squiggles outside, now most people didn't get it at first, but when it was explained they said that it was all the bad things trying to get in, making it look like a safe place.

This week I looked at both of my scenes, scene 10 and scene 3. When we looked at scene ten our focus was on the characters and how they can be played differently, this affected our blocking as at times we had to change certain bits to suit our characters personality, all though my character still needed work, we mainly looked at Nell and her personality and how she would react to something Antony does or says, which later we went into the relationship between Nell and Antony, this session helped me greatly as I felt that the blocking we had already done looked very awkward because neither one of us really understood why our characters where doing what they were, but in this session we created little bits of blocking such as Antony chasing Nell for the catalogue, this looks like both the characters are playful which is what we are looking for.

Scene 3 however hadn't been blocked up till this session for various reasons, I think most of the group including myself were nervous about this scene, as we didn't want to make Carol's death look comical and make the audience laugh. We tried a few ideas out for entering the scene, but we had to get it right because the moment you walk onto that stage for your scene, you either want the audience to understand the pre-scene events, or to wonder what is about to happen, which draws them in, the idea that we came up with for each character shows the difference in how each of them have reacted to the pre-scene event, my character, Henry, is scared, which is understandable as he is only 13, where as Bradly's character, Martin, is Henry's older brother and so when he enters he looks for the hiding spot to keep them both safe, when Tobias enters, played by Zach, he is numb as he has just watched his mother die in front of him, Yasmin plays Carol, and Carol has just watched her friend get dragged into the street, and her hand get decapitated in the door, so Yasmin plays her very frantic.

At the end of this week we started to think about the prologue, and try out ideas. We looked at each scene entering the wardrobe in sequence order, but personally I felt this was missing something and was quite boring, but I do understand why we tried the idea as we were looking at having the scenes look like echoes. We also looked at tangling our selves up inside of the wardrobe and then coming out, I thought that this was quite messy looking, and many of us worried about breaking the wardrobe. The final thing we looked at was doing our own tableaux's inside of the wardrobe, and I felt that this would look better as the epilogue.