My name is James Green, I am a 3rd year level 6 student at Canterbury Christ Church University studying on the Drama course. Practice As Research (PAR) for me was an exciting opportunity to get stuck into the entire process of creating a piece of theatre. It would allow me to harness my creative theatrical perspective on a style of theatre and a topic I am interested in. Whilst at the same time exploring my art as an actor and how far I could push myself.
Ultimately, performing for me has always been about the effect of the audience so there for the audience must learn from this. Specifically, with our piece the audience is forced to question the validity of the stories they see which should in turn allow them to do the same in everyday life.
James Green
Dramaturg, Script Writer, Performer
My name is James Green, I am a 3rd year level 6 student at Canterbury Christ Church University studying on the Drama course. Practice As Research (PAR) for me was an exciting opportunity to get stuck into the entire process of creating a piece of theatre. It would allow me to harness my creative theatrical perspective on a style of theatre and a topic I am interested in. Whilst at the same time exploring my art as an actor and how far I could push myself.
From our very first company meeting the whole group was very keen on making a piece that could showcase both our comedic and political elements. Naturally the work of Bertolt Brecht came into conversation we loved the way the political themes of his pieces were engulfed in another story. This fit hand in hand with the idea of Greek Myths and our ideas of propaganda so we believed they would fit succinctly.
Our Question
“What impact does estrangement of the audience have on how stories are told and their characters perceived”
‘How can performative levels of reality estrange and teach the audience?’
“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.”
― Bertolt Brecht
OUR
DramturgicalTEAM
After several pitches of different Greek myths, plays and tragedies we settled on Oedipus and Antigone. Once we had picked our plays and our question it was down to Cal, Katie and myself to create the concept of the play as a whole. We knew the group liked the ideas of propaganda we had discussed so this was our starting point.
Dramaturgical Process
Working with the initial idea of propaganda it made sense to make changes to both of the stories to reflect this theme. Both Antigone and Oedipus act against their respective Kings in each story, Oedipus kills King Laius causing him to fulfil his destiny. Similarly, Antigone acts against the request of King Creon by burying her brother Polynices. From this we decided that the best way to link the two to form a greater message was to pose them both as propaganda tools used by the 'current king of Thebes' Thersander. Cal suggested using the idea of several levels of reality to help estrange the audience further each time. By using this technique we allow the audience to experience each level acting as a masque to cover the previous reality. It became our objective to create heightened transitions in and out of these levels to remove the audience but a story in each level to pull them back into the action again. This cyclical nature of estranging and drawing them in aims to keep the audience active and aware to the tricks we use. Due to the fact we were telling the stories as if written by King Thersander the audience needed to be aware the stories were different to the originals. Should the audience find the rewritten stories to believable there was a risk our overall message of the piece would be missed. To aid this the audience would be interacted with by our cast in different ways.
The Realities
1. Objective reality (2020 Canterbury)
2. Subjective Reality (Theban Players)
3. False Reality ( Theban Market People)
4. Symbolic Reality (Character Masques)
Explaination
1. The Objective reality is unavoidable in any given circumstance the audience are aware who we are as actors at university.
2. This Subjective Reality represents heightened versions of us as a Theban company preparing a show for King Thersander, in this reality they are spoken to as audience members.
3. This False Reality would showcase us as people in a Theban market so the audience would be spoken to as customers or just citizens of Thebes.
4. This Symbolic Reality we play the roles inside Oedipus and Antigone, the audience would not be interacted with in this level and are treated as an invisible audience.
The premise of how we interacted with the audience we believed would aim in clarifying the different realities. That was then further clarified by drastically heightened transitions into each of our stories.
With the use of puppets of the 'Sacred Cow' and the 'Propaganda Eagle' we could push home a lot of the propaganda. The 'Sacred Cow' is pulled apart to provide the stalls in the market with products to sell at the market. This is followed by the puppet of an Eagle would pick at the carcass of the Sacred Cow every time the plots of the tales took an incorrect turn. We chose an Eagle as we believed it was an accurate way to represent western ideals. This combined with picking at another cultures sacred ideals was an apt way to reflect colonial greed and the forced progression of the capitalist beliefs.
Finally, ending with the beginning of a play after the Victory of the Epigoni shows that the cycle, we started, of propaganda and false storytelling could be continuous. In the hope that the audience would understand that stories should not be taken only at face value but need to be looked into and researched more thoroughly.
Oedipus
My role as scriptwriter was to rewrite the story of Oedipus as if it were a message from King Thersander to the people of Thebes to follow him religiously.
​
To do this is was essential to look into Oedipus as a character and work out what his redeeming features are. The story follows an orphaned boy who was raised unbeknown to him by his adoptive parents in Corinth, he seeks his destiny from the Oracle only to find it is to kill his father and sleep with his mother. To avoid this he runs away from who he believes are his parents to Thebes. He then persists to kill a man and marry a woman many years later it is revealed by a series of plays that he has fulfilled his destiny whilst trying to avoid it, this is a process called self fulfilling prophecy. To turn the audience against Oedipus I changed the story so that he actively fulfils his destiny unsuccessfully with his adoptive parents then accidentally with his real parents. In the original story by Sophocles a further redeeming feature of Oedipus is that he removes his eyes so he can no longer see the mistakes and judgement of the people of Thebes. In this version however he sees know wrongdoing in his actions so his eyes are taken by Jocasta his Wife/Mother.
​
To further alienate the audience through this story after in his head fulfilling his destiny he talks about how he wishes to take control of Thebes to gain more land. For this speech I used a translated version of Hitlers 'Lebensraum' This speech was used initially to convince the German people that Europe was their rightful land that they needed for growth. When transferred to Oedipus it shows a power hungry man who has run into his horrific destiny head first. In addition to this the Nazi party is infamous for the levels of propaganda used within it's regime the plan was that by dropping hints like that it should estrange the audience as some will be aware that they know the speech, or at least some taglines, from elsewhere.
Interviews With The Stars
Practical Application
At the start of the year the news was full of new information about Covid-19 spreading across the globe with China at the Epicentre. Unfortunately this virus rapidly spread and much of the world has been subject to drastic lock-down measures to help contain the spread of the virus. The measures put in place for our safety has cause massive disruption to the world and could have huge knock on effects to many businesses. The sad fact is that theatres are one of the most heavily hit businesses due to larger over head costs and having no real source of income other than ticket sales. After lock-down started Primordial Productions were unable to meet up for rehearsals so the production of our piece slowed down. Luckily at the beginning of the year our team were able to do some workshops that I lead to help each of our team members find characters traits and to spur on some creativity. The idea of these workshops is that with a relatively simple concept an interesting scene or strong character can emerge.
First Characterisation Workshop
The first workshop I lead was a simple Characterisation workshop the idea behind the first phase was to create our 'Theban Player' we wanted essentially a heightened version of who we are as people. The plan was that this would estrange the audience as we would use names similar to our own so the audience would draw a correlation between 'Jamesius' and myself as James. The workshop began with each cat member walking around the space varying pace and direction freely but to show how we each mover in a generic way. Whilst this was happening another group member would follow you and copy your walk. Over a prolonged period of time the follower would hyperbolise your movement to create a heightened walk that your character would use. This workshop is effective to participate in and also to watch footage of due to the fact it is easier to heighten someone else's movement rather than your own. By watching the footage back you can see the progression of the exercise and how each characterisation is formed.
​
The second phase of the workshop offered a similar experience as we asked one team member a series of simple questions they could answer meanwhile, another member would stand behind them and mimic their posture and their gestures. What this exercise does is allows each of us to create a caricature of each person. Similarly to the first phase it is useful to see the footage of this exercise because a lot of the time when we talk we are often guilty of moving our hands more than we realise. This poses the obvious problem of not being able to recreate a heightened version of ourselves accurately. A drawback we found of this exercise was that some people deliberately reduce their movements as they are aware they are being watched for this purpose.
Character Progression Workshop
In the second Characterisation workshop that I ran the idea was to further the second phase of the first workshop by mimicking a person and hyperbolising it. For this exercise we told a familiar story from our childhood whilst the rest of the group listened for different features like tone and intonation. We also focused on things such as hand movements, facial expressions and the way they sat to further deepen our portrayal of each other. After you had told your story you were then replaced by a different member of the group who proceeded to tell your story back to the group with a heightened persona. This is a great exercise to do with a fairly large group due to the fact that each spectator will tune into different traits that the story teller has. This allows each storyteller to get a more in depth analysis of themselves. After the original storyteller has been mimicked by everyone they then retell their story occupying all the heightened traits that have been highlighted over the exercise. This is another workshop that is great to film then watch back as similarly to the first workshop you can again see the entire process build to its final state.
Marketplace Improvisation
This workshop that I led worked similarly to a call and response method in that everyone would have an initial action that they would do in or around the market. Their second action would then be to undo someone else's first action. The idea follows that these two simple actions repeated should develop a scene that can build in pace and remain interesting to watch. For this scene to come into life we created a series of market stools that would sell various products. The idea was that the market would look very temporary to highlight a falseness to the audience. The main plan for this workshop was to allow some sort of scene to develop and from that allow market characters to develop with them.
​
Through this process we then edited our movement as we found that too much was happening on the stage at any one time that the scene felt like it held no purpose. We tried to aid this by having two market thieves manoeuvring around the stalls then attempting to sell the stolen goods to the audience. As a group we felt this held a clearer narrative that worked better than the original scene. In addition to this we felt that having these products stolen then sold on reflected the falseness of the market whilst also reinforcing that the characters within our piece could not be trusted. The audience being wary of our characters should aid us in highlighting our themes or unreliable storytelling and propaganda later on.
Progression of the Marketplace
In the progression of this scene we settled on what the stalls would be selling, again we wanted to mirror the falseness of this market so, all of the stalls sold cow related products. The idea behind this was due to the story that followed Thebes was built where a sacred cow was killed. By showing the stalls now selling leather, milk and cuts of beef this should hint towards commercialising what the city should hold as precious. This is a metaphorical tip of the hat to modern day western consumerist culture where for the right price everything is for sale. We also found that the new format of having two thieves allowed the scene to develop nicely and remain interesting whilst till helping our objective of the scene. Having this all on film allowed us to review each process and analyse what needed working on whilst still allowing everyone to be performing their roles.
The Victory of The Epigoni (First Full Attempt Run Through)
Was Our Piece Successful?
Ultimately this question without a final performance is difficult to answer. Ordinarily a performances success is based upon audience feedback or if the audience received the message you intended them to receive. In this instance we must refer back to our question, “What impact does estrangement of the audience have on how stories are told and their characters perceived?”. Now again this question does seem difficult to answer without a performance so any information has to come from those who have seen sections of our piece. The feedback we received was that the number of various realities was an interesting idea and fairly original. In addition to this the use of comedy to introduce more hard hitting topics was effective to allow the audience occasional respite from the topics. My Sub-question was ‘How can performative levels of reality estrange and teach the audience?’ Now Brecht original work uses two layers of performance the initial performative layer and the new layer he creates in his fourth wall breaks. On the contrary the Stanislavkian technique of only allowing what is on stage to affect the plot. in essence his wish is to use the stage as its own microcosm to continue the plot of the story. What our piece aims to achieve is a cyclical building and breaking of that fourth wall. Through this we aim to find not a middle ground between their work but a new state for the audience to be held in. With Brecht they are very much the viewers of a message, where as with Stanislavsky you are drawn into the plot through its believability. Both of these techniques are to keep you an active audience member. Our aim is to keep you between these states, so you are enticed by our story which allows you to be more malleable to our message.
​
Ultimately, til we receive feedback on the entire piece from an audience our research will not be complete. However, the research conducted up until this point has been positive in allowing us to research the wide variety of plays that use each individual concept. Our unanswered question is does this repetitive building and breaking of that fourth wall help our piece deliver its message?
How Have I Grown?
My growth in this module in my opinion has been both vast and diverse. My skills as an actor have been stretched by the complexity of the meta-theatrical make up of our piece. It required me to play several different tropes of characters within a quick turn around and some even within the same scene. This I found was a test of both mental and physical strength, it is a work in progress but switching from one physicality and vocal range to another requires a greater level of both skill and belief that was new to my work. In addition to this my dramaturgical skills have pushed to new limits, when faced with the task of finding something new to research and attempting to make that vision a reality. Having to conceptualise the vision, then in turn having to pitch it to the group and find exercises to create scenes, to achieve the vision was a challenge in the past I would not have risen to. With the help of the group and the research done into other plays working on similar concepts have allowed me to take more control over my creativity. Finally, the largest challenge I faced was the challenge to edit and write the new abridged version of Oedipus. Taking a story so well known after being immortalised by Sophocles and further still by Sigmund Freud was always going to be a task. I have never been confident in my ability to write succinctly let alone well enough to interest and audience for a extended period of time. This project allowed me to gain confidence in my abilities to write and hopefully I can continue to do so in the future.