QUESTION 1 - DEVISED

SECTION 1 

The stimulus I was given for my devising piece was 'Wounds To The Face' by playwright Howard Barker. After a first read through of the extract, the first thing I noticed is that the stimulus I was given was rather dark and harsh in some moments. Another thing I noticed straight away was that there were multiple cases of certain lines written in capital letters, I thought that this could have been done to change the volume and tone for when the actor is performing it or it could show desperation, fear or even weakness in these characters, also it gives a non-naturalistic aspect to the piece. 

Another thing I noticed was that all of the characters are nameless (mother, lover, prisoner etc...)which was unusual, this could possibly have been done so the characters are seen as a blank canvas that can be further developed. A common theme throughout this text was the face, age, and appearance, although these are shown in a very negative light and reflects how important all of themes are within society and how it affects people. There were a few monologues in the stimulus which could possibly be interpreted as being non-naturalistic. There were no clear links between all of the scenes apart from the three themes mentioned earlier which all ran throughout. 

There were uses of a lot of pauses in the stage direction, this is usually done to create tension and also to make the audience really think about what they're watching, which is something Howard Barkers aims towards when creating a piece of work. The dialogue seems to be indirect, especially in the scenes including monologues, which gives an uncertain feel to it and makes the audience feel unsettled or uncomfortable, another one of Barkers aims in his work. There was use of a prop mirror in some of the scenes which links to the theme of faces and how you see yourself through your eyes, not anyone else's. The stimulus as a whole seems rather ambiguous and occasionally doesn't make much sense to an audience.  

When I first began the devising process, the first idea I came up with was scenes set in an Australian prison camp in the 1800’s, specifically showing the roles of authority and the prisoners and the harsh treatment of those prisoners and the emotional and physical effects on them. The scene involved 3 characters, a prison guard, a ‘dinner lady’ type character and a prisoner. The prison guard and dinner lady suspected the prisoner of stealing food from the canteen (which he didn’t actually do) and the result of this was a violent act upon the prisoner. This starting point focused a lot on narrative and character dynamics which we as a group struggled to develop much further and eventually decided to make a slight change to our piece. We started to improvise scenes using the basic ideas of our first devised scene, so the concept of prisoners and authority but most importantly the whole improvising process ended up being very absurd and having surreal and non-linear aspects to it and less focus on narrative, character and more on Kneehigh inspired styles such as physical theatre and sound. After more thorough improvising we eventually ended up with the concept of the ‘glasshouse’ which is the whole setting that our characters are kept in, our characters being extremely absurd and seemingly mentally unstable ‘test subjects’ called ‘OBF’ and ‘OBM’ as well as another character ‘anomaly’ who appears to be a part of an experiment on the other two characters. Once I had enough improvised scenes to have a solid foundation of a piece I decided to add context to it to give myself a more solid base to work from and also a background of my character to keep in mind when rehearsing to help my character development. Once all of this had been done, I began to add a more defined narrative which is ‘OBF’ and ‘OBM’ being captured for ‘human experimentation’ after a significant rise in CO2 emissions in the atmosphere in the near future (2051, making the piece a dystopia). Then how they cope and respond to different stimuli given to them in the glasshouse. ‘Anomaly’ is then introduced to do what the audience thinks is observe but this may not be quite the case as he is later terminated alongside the other ‘glasshouse’ members.