Our stimulus: Madness
When we first got this stimulus, everyone focused on the common idea of madness as an illness and based at mental institutions, as madness is socially constructed and everyone differs to different people, we decided not to follow that path as there are many people who doesn’t fit the set meaning of insane but are still regarded as insane and this also made us question ‘who is insane/sane?’.
Our initial ideas were developed through researches about madness. Firstly we agreed to base our play on personality disorder, that the main character would be someone with 5 different personalities and have each person play the different personality in this characters life, with this idea we researched this disorder and started developing our play around this but every time we tried to improvise, it didn’t work and we didn’t progress much because we realised that we all have different personalities and identities anyway.
From this idea we thought about people who could be regarded as insane due to extreme multiple personality but isn’t institutionalised- through research and sharing ideas we came across dictators, we researched famous dictators like Adolf Hitler, we also watched ‘The Last King of Scotland’ which was very useful as it is a true story of a famous dictator, it showed key moments in his life, his intentions and this answered some of our question about dictatorship. We felt this was a good way to show a different side to madness. As we developed this idea, we choose to address a contemporary issue of immigration because the audience would relate to this very well and we have more knowledge on this issue to explore.
After we received feedback from teacher and classmates, we decided to change the ending it was not as powerful as we hoped because our play dramatically builds up on the dictator’s life and having a suicidal ending, where