Category Archives: Dramaturg

Shake the Week

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Following on from using individually constructed Shakespearean ‘dialogues’ as transitional scenes, we were at the point of devising the final scene, the creme de la creme. It only seemed plausible that after using male monologues already, that the women’s voice of Shakespeare should be voiced, after all the interesting heroine characters of Shakespeare are either portrayed as the crazy or the virginal submissive. Therefore the characters such as Lady MacBeth, Juliet and Viola deserved to be re-interpreted and thus delivered in a comedic style. Sounds obscene, unrealistic?

 

Yet it is studying these notorious monologues hardly and uncovering the underscoring themes that helped to focus from another angle and therefore really bring the humour to light. For example, Juliet’s monologue that talks of her husband of three hours, Romeo, being banished for Tybalt’s death we understand as her weeping for Romeo, her recent husband, given the context of the whole play. Yet taking this monologue completely out of the context of Romeo and Juliet and focusing on the main aspect of the monologue; that Romeo has gone, enables the hilarity of the situation to ensue if we remember that she is a ‘Newlywed’.

And so finding comedic links between all of these female monologues created the perfect set up for a ‘Stand Up’ style outset for the final scene. Thus with certain aspects of these monologues being comedic through their themes, it is the themes that evoked the style of ‘Mock the Week’, and is what the scene is loosely based on. With each of the 6 performers adapting elements of a stand up comedian’s repertoire and channelling some of their comic timing in their deliverance of the monologues, these texts will hopefully achieve the transitions from monologues to ‘gags’. Therefore channelling the comedienne Sarah Millican whilst delivering Juliet’s monologue “Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?..” helped Jess Jarvis’ characterisation of developing comic timing as well as the new perception of this ‘Geordie Newlywed’…

Dialogue as opposed to Monologue

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Concluding the decision of using themes of Power, Fame, Beauty and Feminism throughout the performance, it was the general consensus amongst the cast that using Shakespeare within our piece was a fundamental aspect due to the challenge of re-interpreting Shakespeare being a challenge we openly accepted. Thus looking at the male monologues in particular from various plays such as Hamlet, MacBeth and King Lear links were found between certain characters. For instance subtle links were found between Hamlet and Titus Andronicus’ monologues in their theme of contemplation, or rather I interpreted them thus. Therefore by editing both of these to create a dialogue between both characters, this was taking them completely out of the context of the play as their deliverance would be comedic, as opposed to them originally being a part of a tragic play.

Subtle links were found between King Lear and Titus also in terms of their maddening tone, with MacBeth and the character of Caliban it seemed that their similiar plan of plotting murder evoked comedic tones and so coupling these seemed appropriate. As well as pairing King Lear’s famous “O reason not the need…” monologue with Hamlet’s monologue, they both comparatively sound alike a teenage tantrum once read as such. And so these 4 individual pairings seemed to each produce themes of Contemplation, Madness, Murder and Indulgence, and due to each of their ‘dialogues’ lasting roughly 2 minutes it seemed that they would work well as transitional scenes, acting as sub-themes, between the main themes consisting of Pop Culture, Power, Fame, Beauty, Feminism and Comedy.

Altering, writing and improving

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As Director of Hand Me Down Theatre, it is my job to maintain the progress of the script and that each scene I direct coincides with the company manifesto. Framing our piece at the beginning of the process, we outlined the main themes we wanted to explore. Yet deciding on an innovative opening scene is something that needed to be perfected in order to shape our piece and lead into the rest of the performance. Therefore deciding on the initial idea of exploring the absurdity of modern song lyrics in pop culture, we decided to introduce the 8 performers of the ensemble that would be performing in this opening scene.

 

Opening Scene Script

Opening Scene Script

 

Experimenting with a confessional and therapy style scene, we created an intimate performance whereby each character was drawn from our interpretation of the song lyrics. Our initial catalyst for this idea was Pitbull’s lyrics:

 

Me not working hard? Yeah right, picture that with a kodak. Or better yet, go to Times Square and take a picture of me with a kodak. Took my life from negative to positive. I just wanted y’all to know that.

 

It seemed that whilst these lyrics are completely ridiculous out of context, and arguably within their context, we were able to interpret them as a kind of confession when delivering them. And so this led to the thought of creating a dialogue constructed with lyrics that made no sense at all yet when delivered in a context they would seem understandable, almost Dadaist. Rudolf Kuenzil defined Dadaism as questioning

 

the myth of originality, of the artist as genius, suggesting instead that everybody should be an artist and that almost anything could be art. [and]… Dada works still have radicalism and freshness that attracts today’s culture jammers and disrupters of life as usual. (2006, p. 14)

 

Essentially this is an element of what our opening scene consists of. We shared this scene in our class workshop, mainly consisting of spoken lyrics acting as dialogue throughout the 10 minutes by 8 performers, each adopting a trait of a character, e.g. an alcoholic or sex addict. The feedback we received of this scene was constructive; elements such as the rhythm of the piece leading into a crescendo needed improving as well as not revealing too much a sense of the piece at the outset. Before sharing this scene the following week, I essentially changed the scene completely, creating more of a dialogue at the beginning to ease into the scene and then slowly interjecting lyrics of songs that led to a montage of songs. The crescendo that we hopefully achieved was through the rhythm of the words being interjected at a consistent pace by every performer.

 

Yet as the scene was staged by integrating the audience into the circle we created to try and replicate the atmosphere of a therapy style session, the characters needed to be more relatable to the audience and less extreme if this is the style that we are going to maintain. However, experimenting with the idea of staging our performance as a promenade would mean that the audience would see this scene from another perspective; observing in rather than being included. Thus this would allow the scene to be more effective in terms of challenging the audience to observe from an outsider and listen to the words of the piece rather than being caught up in the surrealism of this scene if they were included in the circle, as our objective would be lost.

 

Works cited:

Kuenzil, Rudolf (2006) Dada, London: Phaidon Press Ltd.

Shaffer, Smith (2014) AZ Lyrics, Online: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/pitbull/givemeeverything.html (accessed: 31 March 2014).