Mise En Scene The Orange Circle

Figure 1: The orange circles represent Sandy and the black circles represent his relatives, his mother, uncle and aunt. The arrows indicate their respective coloured circle’s stage direction and the numbers indicate the order of which movement takes place. The blue rectangle moved onto the stage is Sandy’s bed.
Voice:
Sandy’s voice in this scene reflects his transitioning emotions as he moves from relative to relative. With his mother, his voice is calm as the fear and uneasiness of the situation is only just expressed through his tone, while when he crosses to his aunt, his loud sobs sound miserable like a helpless child. His relative’s voices are rushed and in panic as they try to save the young boy from the Welfare.
Body:
As with voice,
He tenses and fidgets like a child, throwing his arms around and grasping tightly onto the sides of the bed while screwing up his face in misery. The authority figure’s physicality is conceited and smug, while sinister like a snake, as he reaches around Jimmy in all directions attempting to break him.
Ensemble:
While the authority figure is just a figure of Jimmy’s imagination, he does sometime interact and share ensemble with it. While the figure clearly dominates the scene, Jimmy attempts to fight back as best he can, projecting his voice right at him and scrunching up his fists, only to be beaten back down with mockery and cruelty. The authority figure, like the bars to Jimmy’s cage, controls him, grabbing at his face and tormenting him with the words “your mum’s dead”, until finally Jimmy loses with a crumbled up letter torn in two.
Scene 4 – Sandy’s Memories
Figure 4: The orange circle represents Sandy and the white circles represent the two authority figures. The arrows indicate their respective coloured circle’s stage direction and the numbers indicate the order of which movement takes place. The blue rectangle is Sandy’s
The arrows indicate their respective coloured circle’s stage direction and the numbers indicate the order of which movement takes place. The blue rectangles are the three children’s beds, left to right being Ruby’s, Sandy’s and Jimmy’s, and the black lines represent the cell bars set piece.
Voice:
Both Sandy and Jimmy speak and sing in high pitch, child appropriate voices. Along with this, the two are easily excitable and energetic in their voices. Ruby, only having one line other than answering the boy’s nursery rhyme, speaks passively, afraid to show emotion or recover the memories of her abuse.
Body:
Both boys are energetic, jumpy and naïve in their actions, as they leap up at the sight of Ruby entering after her weekend stay. Joining in on Jimmy’s cheeky game, the two surround Ruby and begin clapping around her singing child nursery rhyme “can you keep a secret?” While bopping their heads, smiling from happiness, and bouncing their knees and hands to clap, our director’s idea of contrasting the rhyme with Ruby’s abusive history was presented, making the scene all the more disturbing. As the boys are surrounding Ruby, this invades her personal space and makes the scene feel intrusive to the audience as they now understand what she has gone through and are not stopped by naivety. Ruby herself tightly grasps her arms and shoulders throughout the scene in a nervous,