Research - The play is centred around modern life in the East End. It revolves around many different characters telling stories to a taxi driver in the East End of London. The writer could have written "Tales Of The East End' to address his concerns about the current society we live in and the things that we need to sort out with one another. Every lesson, we would take part in different tasks and activities set by the teacher to help us develop our characters and to create pieces of theatre that could be used in the performance. Research has helped me to develop the characters that I am portraying in the play. For example, I have been able to look up Cockney Rhyming Slang that could be used in certain scenes and I was also able to research ways to include an East End accent in the play without being over the top. The aim was to make the play realistic so that the audience would get a real sense of what the East End is like.
I found these websites particularly useful:
http://londontopia.net/londonism/fun-london/language-top-100-cockney-rhyming-slang-words-and-phrases/
http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-do-a-cockney-accent
Development - Over the weeks of studying the play "Tales Of The East End", I was able to gain a deeper understanding of many of the characters in the play. As an ensemble cast, we were also able to interpret the characters and scenes in different ways using physical theatre. We developed characters through tone of voice, body movements and we interpreted different scenarios through physical theatre (e.g. using our body to show a certain type of weather). One of the things that stood out for me was using everyone in the cast to create sound effects by using different parts of the body and voices. For example, we would all click our fingers or pat our legs to create the sound of hailstones.
Staging - Our original choice of staging was thrust. This initially came to mind as it meant that we could interact with the audience from all angles. However, we later decided that a proscenium stage would be better as the audience would always be able to see the whole cast and what was going on. It was also more practical this way as it meant that it was easier to fit the cast onto the stage.
Style - The style of this play is very different to many that I have studied in the past. For example, the script doesn't have any stage directions or characters speaking. This means that it is up to the cast and director to decide who says what and how we portray the scenes. A lot of the time, it felt like we were reading a story rather than a script. This was a nice change as previously we have studied a script that was completely the opposite (Noughts & Crosses). I like this style of play as it feels like we have a long creative process to complete, where we can freely decide what we want to happen in the play.
Storytelling - During the devision of this play, we would constantly focus on trying to tell a story through sound and physical theatre. In many of the scenes, there would be a narrator who said many parts of the script to address the audience and give them a better understanding of the play. We also had the task of creating a story through physical theatre. An example of physical theatre in the play was when a few of the actors created an umbrella that opened using just movements with their arms. This helped to tell the story thought body movement, rather than using a literal umbrella to show what is happening in the story.
Multiple Roles - Many of the actors in the cast had multiple roles to portray. In my scene at the supermarket, I would occasionally have to suddenly switch from an angry customer to a happy family member. This was difficult as the change happens very fast, but after weeks of working on developing different characters you start to get used to playing them all very frequently.
Change of Location - To change a location in the play we would all work as an ensemble to make the atmosphere change, like when we used our bodies to create the sounds of different weather. We wanted to try and make the audience feel like they had been transported to the East End through a piece of theatre. This is why we wanted to make the sounds of the locations very accurate. Many of us would create siren or car sounds to emphasise the fact that the scene is taking place outside near many busy roads.
Final Performance - I was very pleased with the performances that we showed to audiences on February 12th. Everyone was very happy with the final piece and we all enjoyed performing our work to two audiences. We all pulled together and worked hard to make a piece of theatre that we were all very proud of. Some of the best moments were when we all worked together as an ensemble to give the audience a taste of what the East End is like. I think that Tale 3 worked very well in creating an atmosphere for the East End. We also added hints of humour into the play, which I think worked well too. Tale 2, where all the boys worked together didn't get off to a great start, but thanks to most of our hard work and determination, we created a piece of theatre that we thought many people would enjoy watching. This was one of the tales that I was most proud of, as you can see that it has improved hugely since we first started working on it. I think that the domestic violence scene with Oriana and Thiago was very good as it created a tense atmosphere and also evoked a lot of emotion and sympathy from the audience. The direction of this piece was very good and the acting was brilliant. I enjoyed watching many of the other tales in the play too. I think it is interesting to see how all of the tales came together to make one big play. We managed to improve many of the weak points in the play to make them more polished. It was difficult to work as an ensemble as there were so many people to direct and sometimes it got a bit out of hand. As lines kept changing throughout the process of devising the play, it was quite difficult to know what to learn but in the end everyone managed to learn all of their lines. One of the main problems was due to people not turning up on performance day. However, the understudies did a very good job considering the amount of time that they had to learn their lines. Over the course of this term, I have improved my physical theatre skills a lot. I feel as though my confidence has also been boosted a lot this term and I feel more comfortable directing scenes now. I have learnt how to interpret characters in other ways and how to put on a play without constant dialogue, by using physical theatre. This term has been very productive and I think that we have all improved our acting skills. In my opinion, many of the rehearsals went very well. There were ups and downs throughout the whole course of creating this show, but all went well in the end.
