Play Analysis: Unrequited Love
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Question 01 – what’s it about, audience, style, genre, period, space, technical, your role.
In November 2011 my group and I performed a devised piece entitled ‘Unrequited Love’. The theme of our piece was conflict, young people in love but with different aims in life. As well as the couple’s conflict we had two other characters who wanted to be loved but had to be underhanded to get it! Finally to add even more chaos we had the interfering parents! Our piece was inspired by the genre Commedia Dell ‘Arte but we also incorporated spoof and parody. Our performance style was very physical and melodramatic. I worked with my group to devise and direct the piece but I also acted as two characters in the play. We had …show more content…
pictures of Commedia characters as our first stimulus and then we each found examples of these characters in T.V and film to help our characterisation.
Our target audience was teenagers as our main characters were young people slightly older than us. Because we wanted it to appeal to our age group we wanted to make it very current and funny – so there were lots of jokes that referred to popular culture. The text we incorporated was catchphrases from current popular T.V programmes and an extract from ‘The Importance of Being Ernest’ by Oscar Wilde – we adapted and modernised a scene to fit our storyline. We used quite a lot of music in our piece and some simple lighting (except for a nightclub scene when we had flashing coloured lights). We used the piece of music ‘The Devil’s Gallop’ at the very start of the piece to set the tone and to accompany our introduction which was a speeded up silent-movie style version of the whole play. We also used some current chart music, for example the club scene. I think our use of space was really good as we used stage blocks to create
levels, different areas of the stage (upstage, downstage) to give the audience a split-focus as we wanted to have all characters on stage at all times. This was because it was important for our audience to see the dramatic irony when certain characters were talking about others – for example when one of my characters, Pantaloon (Chanel’s dad) is saying how pure and innocent his precious daughter is whilst the audience can clearly see her flirting and cuddling Tarquin!
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Question 02 Development of creative ideas, example of how skills applied in prep.
When devising the piece we decided that all our characters should have very exaggerated movements and expressions and we had each character speaking with a very distinctive voice. We based each character on a ‘stock’ character from the Commedia genre but we changed the names to update them and to add to the comedy as we were making fun of the silly names that celebrities seem to have these days. For example our character based on Harlequin was called ‘Tarquin’ and Columbina became ‘Chanel’. As an actor in the piece I looked at pictures and watched clips of Commedia Dell ‘Arte performances to give me ideas and I spent lots of time in rehearsal perfecting my movements and gestures to make my character seem totally ridiculous. I wanted the audience to dislike my characters actions (I played Chanel’s mother and Father – the mother based on Lady Bracknall in ‘The Importance of Being Ernest’ and the father based on Pantaloon – a mean, selfish and stupid old man!) but I also wanted them to enjoy watching him on stage. Eventually, make the Pantaloon character very distinct from the mother character – I decided to make his voice like a famous voice-over man from T.V’s ‘The X-Factor’. This looked and sounded ridiculous and made people laugh out loud. I had to change the pitch of my voice to sound deep like a man and also make the tone of my voice very monotone. This was difficult at first because I’m a girl and I kept running out of breath. Miss did some breathing exercises with me and I then warmed up in each rehearsal.
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Question 03 Success of team-work in rehearsal and examples.
I think our group worked very well together as we all had different strengths and personalities. We all tried to encourage each other to really go for it when we were developing our characters because we all had to be over-the-top. As a group we decided to try and move and walk in an exaggerated way in every lesson so that we got less and less embarrassed! We had decided as a group that we wanted to do a comedy piece which we knew would be a challenge but because we all really enjoy the genre we were determined to make it work. Some people in the group are naturally funny and I didn’t find it as easy but people would make suggestions and as our target audience was our age we knew that if our group found it funny then our audience would.
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Question 04 Evaluate how you achieved aims, give examples of particular moments.
I’m very happy with our final performance as the audience were really laughing the whole way through. I would definitely like to do comedy again as you know straight away if it’s working because of the audience’s reaction. Because they were laughing, we got more and more into our parts and sort of ‘played up’ to them. It felt like showing off and we all said afterwards we felt a real buzz from it. The scene when I was being mean to my other daughter ‘Gucci’ worked really well because we seemed to bounce really well off each other. It was hard not to laugh when ‘Gucci’ was snorting like a horse but I managed to keep a straight face. This made it funnier because there was such a contrast between us. I think one of the best moments was when we were dancing on the plane, at this point I really got into it as the audience were clearly loving it. One main aim was to get the audience to feel sorry for Harley’s character Pablo (based on Pierrot from Commedia Dell ‘Arte) which definitely worked because the audience would say ‘aaah’ in a pantomime way. Also of course we wanted the whole thing to be funny and I think we definitely achieved this as people were pretty much laughing non-stop.
Question 01 – what’s it about, audience, style, genre, period, space, technical, your role.
In November 2011 my group and I performed a devised piece entitled ‘Unrequited Love’. The theme of our piece was conflict, young people in love but with different aims in life. As well as the couple’s conflict we had two other characters who wanted to be loved but had to be underhanded to get it! Finally to add even more chaos we had the interfering parents! Our piece was inspired by the genre Commedia Dell ‘Arte but we also incorporated spoof and parody. Our performance style was very physical and melodramatic. I worked with my group to devise and direct the piece but I also acted as two characters in the play. We had …show more content…
pictures of Commedia characters as our first stimulus and then we each found examples of these characters in T.V and film to help our characterisation.
Our target audience was teenagers as our main characters were young people slightly older than us. Because we wanted it to appeal to our age group we wanted to make it very current and funny – so there were lots of jokes that referred to popular culture. The text we incorporated was catchphrases from current popular T.V programmes and an extract from ‘The Importance of Being Ernest’ by Oscar Wilde – we adapted and modernised a scene to fit our storyline. We used quite a lot of music in our piece and some simple lighting (except for a nightclub scene when we had flashing coloured lights). We used the piece of music ‘The Devil’s Gallop’ at the very start of the piece to set the tone and to accompany our introduction which was a speeded up silent-movie style version of the whole play. We also used some current chart music, for example the club scene. I think our use of space was really good as we used stage blocks to create
levels, different areas of the stage (upstage, downstage) to give the audience a split-focus as we wanted to have all characters on stage at all times. This was because it was important for our audience to see the dramatic irony when certain characters were talking about others – for example when one of my characters, Pantaloon (Chanel’s dad) is saying how pure and innocent his precious daughter is whilst the audience can clearly see her flirting and cuddling Tarquin!
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Question 02 Development of creative ideas, example of how skills applied in prep.
When devising the piece we decided that all our characters should have very exaggerated movements and expressions and we had each character speaking with a very distinctive voice. We based each character on a ‘stock’ character from the Commedia genre but we changed the names to update them and to add to the comedy as we were making fun of the silly names that celebrities seem to have these days. For example our character based on Harlequin was called ‘Tarquin’ and Columbina became ‘Chanel’. As an actor in the piece I looked at pictures and watched clips of Commedia Dell ‘Arte performances to give me ideas and I spent lots of time in rehearsal perfecting my movements and gestures to make my character seem totally ridiculous. I wanted the audience to dislike my characters actions (I played Chanel’s mother and Father – the mother based on Lady Bracknall in ‘The Importance of Being Ernest’ and the father based on Pantaloon – a mean, selfish and stupid old man!) but I also wanted them to enjoy watching him on stage. Eventually, make the Pantaloon character very distinct from the mother character – I decided to make his voice like a famous voice-over man from T.V’s ‘The X-Factor’. This looked and sounded ridiculous and made people laugh out loud. I had to change the pitch of my voice to sound deep like a man and also make the tone of my voice very monotone. This was difficult at first because I’m a girl and I kept running out of breath. Miss did some breathing exercises with me and I then warmed up in each rehearsal.
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Question 03 Success of team-work in rehearsal and examples.
I think our group worked very well together as we all had different strengths and personalities. We all tried to encourage each other to really go for it when we were developing our characters because we all had to be over-the-top. As a group we decided to try and move and walk in an exaggerated way in every lesson so that we got less and less embarrassed! We had decided as a group that we wanted to do a comedy piece which we knew would be a challenge but because we all really enjoy the genre we were determined to make it work. Some people in the group are naturally funny and I didn’t find it as easy but people would make suggestions and as our target audience was our age we knew that if our group found it funny then our audience would.
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Question 04 Evaluate how you achieved aims, give examples of particular moments.
I’m very happy with our final performance as the audience were really laughing the whole way through. I would definitely like to do comedy again as you know straight away if it’s working because of the audience’s reaction. Because they were laughing, we got more and more into our parts and sort of ‘played up’ to them. It felt like showing off and we all said afterwards we felt a real buzz from it. The scene when I was being mean to my other daughter ‘Gucci’ worked really well because we seemed to bounce really well off each other. It was hard not to laugh when ‘Gucci’ was snorting like a horse but I managed to keep a straight face. This made it funnier because there was such a contrast between us. I think one of the best moments was when we were dancing on the plane, at this point I really got into it as the audience were clearly loving it. One main aim was to get the audience to feel sorry for Harley’s character Pablo (based on Pierrot from Commedia Dell ‘Arte) which definitely worked because the audience would say ‘aaah’ in a pantomime way. Also of course we wanted the whole thing to be funny and I think we definitely achieved this as people were pretty much laughing non-stop.