Week starting 13th October

At the start of this week we worked through the last of the play and added in more physical theatre during the dialogue. This meant getting everyone involved, not just the people speaking. I think this is good as it makes the production feel more like a company production, as well as giving us something to do. I think the San bits of physical theatre also work very well to break up the dialogue and make the play more interesting to watch. Adding in this extra things also increases are physical theatre skills such as lifting and creating scenes and objects with ourselves.

This week we did a lot of character work, thinking about their relationships with Christopher and their personalities. We started working in groups, combining our ideas, to create mind naps of some of the characters. I think this was effective as it got us thinking about how we could play them and bringing fresh ideas to help us create our characters. We also then wrote a monologue from our characters point of view, so I did Mrs shears. I think writing from her perspective helped me to think more about her life and how she would feel and interact with Christopher. Writing everything down made it clearer that actually Mrs shears has been through a lot and as a result would not be very keen about Christopher or his parents.

I have previously read the novel of the curious incident twice before so I am already very familiar with the story. There are some differences between the book and the play, obviously the illustrations cannot be seen like in the book which I think detracts from some of the understanding into Christopher's autism, for example the smiley faces. It also does not talk as much about Christopher himself. I think this is because it relies more on the actors portrayal of Christopher to create his character and personality.

I think the extra physical theatre sections we added into the play were successful because they add extra interest to the performance. Also as a class I think physical theatre is one of our best techniques so it shows of our strengths. At the moment we are still reading from scripts which detracts from the atmosphere and emotions behind the lines which is a weakness. This will obviously improve when our lines are learnt so we can work on the internation and gestures that go with the words.

To improve the production further I think we need to learn and perfect the transitions between different parts of th  play when everyone is involved. An example of this is the London train station scene with all of the lifts and slow motion, which we need to keep practising and make it completely smooth.