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Choosing Our Story

When my group decided on our story from the Iliad, we realised we had to decide how we wanted this to be portrayed, did we want it to be a musical or a comedy, or an action piece, after some deliberation we chose to make our piece a comedy as we feel that comedy would make it so we could tell the story without it coming across monotonous. We wanted to make sure that even though we were making our piece comedic we did not want it to seem forced because this would not have the effect we desired and then it would make our piece boring for the audience which is definitely not what we want.

Me and Scott had a look into Commedia and we realised that some of the characters in Commedia match to the ones in our story, so we decided to use these to let them better our characters

According to London theatre critic Barretti, commedia dell'arte incorporates specific roles and characters that were "originally intended as a kind of characteristic representative of some particular Italian district or town." So they were intended to represent certain characteristics of people’s personalities, so we used these characters as a base for some in our piece, it was hard to stick close to the classic story and our piece did divert sometimes from the classic material however the classic was what most of our performance was based on.

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Eric Grode on the TDF Theatre Dictionary website states that a devised process “typically begins with little more than a rehearsal space and a group of eager, committed theatre practitioners. Through a series of improvisatory theatre games or other conceptual ice-breakers, they start to tease out the kinds of stories they’d like to tell and the way they’d like to tell them. Over time, a text emerges, one covered with the fingerprints of each and every participant.”

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The story we decided on was discovered by the group after some time trying to find a common interest in a story, when we found this story we all found something in it that caught our eyes. Our common interests centered around comedy so we felt that doing this story in a comedic way was right for us as a group. We took some interest in Commedia dell'Arte Characters that they use like Capitano and the lovers, we took some interest in those to help us with our characters and make it so they seemed more interesting for the audience because retelling a classic tale was a challenge as we didn’t want to lose the essence of the classic but we also didn’t want to lose the attention of the audience by making it really monotonous and boring, it was hard to stick close to the classic story and our piece did divert sometimes from the classic material however the classic was what most of our performance was based on.

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What was your key learning point?

My key learning point was to make sure we had a clean and structured understanding of our story and how we were putting it on stage, and I believed we did this, we understood our story very well before it was put before an audience, and we also made sure that we had developed our characters a lot more from when we originally assigned the characters to each other. 

We had connected the character Paris to the character The Lover and Menelaus to the character Capitano from Commedia Del`arte, this helped us see those personalities in a more broken down way so we could put 100% into portraying them to the best of our abilities.

Although we wanted the audience to see our character’s personalities in the performance we did not want them to lose the main genre of our performance so keeping the comedic side of our characters was one thing we had to work on together, to do this we took some inspiration from things such as Life Of Brian and Slap Stick comedy. We took inspiration from these and made our characters have something that was different about them, something that we believed would make the audience laugh without it seeming too forced and while we ourselves actually enjoyed performing the piece.

“Comedy is difficult, especially slapstick. The trick is to have fun while you are performing it.”— Maureen O'Hara

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What was your key learning block?

I believe that in my group, we had some difficulty trying to figure out how we were going to put this very unmodern story on stage in our more modern and comedic way, and after focusing so much on just the script and trying to find the story we realized we may need to calm down and take a step back from that and just do what we had and just see what we come up with on the spot, from doing this we came up with many great ideas for some lovely scenes and some amazing jokes. 

I believe that taking a step back from just worrying about the words really did help us as it made us think about how our performance is not just about the lines we say, but how everything looks on stage, and how we even say our own lines.

I also believe we had some trouble fully committing to our characters, and trying to differentiate the multi rolling of our characters, people who were multi rolling were coming into rehearsals and did not have any specific things different between the characters which make the performance way more confusing and it almost ruins the story, we took some time out of our rehearsals to sit down with each other and go through the specifics of each character we play, we all commented ways that we could make the characters different from each other and we all left this conversation with many more ideas for our characters and the next time we met we all had characters who were easier to tell apart in scenes and it definitely made the story seem better, as we see here “You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.” ― Joss Whedon. 

This quote tells me that you can create a character and make them be who you want but unless you put yourself into the shoes of this character and see what their point of view is, you will never know what they are truly like.

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With respect to devised storytelling centred on renewal of classics, what do you need to do next?

After performing my piece with my group I believe there was more we could have done with our piece, I feel that if we had chosen our story sooner than we did we could have worked on stage a lot more and included some more sets because our stage was very very basic and we did not use much set at all.

I also believe we could have worked on getting some sound into our performance because in some scenes it felt very quiet even with people saying their lines it felt almost awkward during our battle scene as it did not have any background noise, so I feel like if we had more time we could have added some sound there and in other scenes.

I feel like after this performance if I had to do another devising piece I would know how to go about putting one together, and I would be able to include all the stuff we missed from our performance this year, for example, using more set in our piece to actually create places for the characters that you can tell apart, and using some sound and music so the scenes do not feel so silent in the background. I would even say that we could add some more lights for certain parts of the show just so it was more of a technical show instead of having our plain basic backwashes like we did.

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Bibliography

Book 3 and 4 of  The Iliad – Homer

Commedoa Dell`arte - Commedia Dell'arte - Characters (liquisearch.com)

 Joss Whedon.- “You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.” 

What is Devised Theatre- Theatre Times - https://href.li/?https://thetheatretimes.com/what-is-devised-theatre/

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The Production Process