Working on the Prologue

I missed this part of the lesson becauseI  was in a peri, but looking at the prologue I would have staged the two characters (the customer and taxi driver) sitting opposite each other on the floor to make the audience feel as if they were veiwing a brief reprieve from the taxi drivers usually hectic life. I would have made the other character start out distant, as you usually would in a taxi, but gradually become more comfortable. Making the characters who first seem so different eventually slip into casual coversation would set the feeling of the east end being a place where no one is what you think them to be, which is later explored in all the tales.

I would have taken pauses between lines like 'knoworramean?' for the other character to tell the taxi driver about their life, firstly talking about fairly generic topics like how early it is, but later more personal ones like family and children. 

I think its important to analyse the prologue because this would be the first scene the audience sees, and though the content dosent give them a clue as to whats happening in the rest of the play, it does transport them to the east end and sets them up to view the rest of the tales in the context of their surroundings.

Tale 4 Research

For homework mr Worden asked us to look at either tales one, two, three or found in groups of five or six, he asked us to focus on developing an understanding of the characters and more specifiacally find or draw images of the characters and what we imagine them to be like.

I looked at tale four which is essentially looking at the how people in the east end treat old people, and how we assume old people are treated.

the tale is told in the perspective of a teeneager whos gender is never clarrified but i decided it was a girl, she is told by her father to buy him a 20 pack of regals and on her way sees an old lady struggling to cross the road. She helps this lady with her shopping and at the end is sitting with a packet of crisps the lady bought her looking at the rain.

The actual language used in the tale is very visually descriptive; the writer talks about the 'swollen drops explode on to the pavement and crash off the walls of the estate'. 

and then when the girl sees her 'Traffic thurdering past, rain pummelling down'

 'and bouncing off her head, grey hair matted with the wet'

'i offer the brolly, try to keep the rain off the pensioners trolley'

As far as the old woman i would see her character as being frustrated, feeling 100%  mentally able but not having the abilty to command her body to do everyday tasks, in staging this i would try to convey the suprise the woman felt at being helped by the teenager as being suprised by the good in people seems to be a recurring theme in the play.

Tale 8

At the end of the lesson we looked at tale 8 ad underlined words that created atmosphere to us, mine are as follows:

clap of thunder

suddenly youre in the wrong place

its early

eerie

just before sunrise

a burrow between buildings

concrete jungle

lawless tunnel in the gangland war

As a group we didnt quite understand the task as it was explained to us, so instead of creating a more contemporary piece we tried to depict a part of the scene with the tension. I dont think this exercise was very sucessful because we werent very focused or sure of what direction we wanted to take it but we decided to stage it with sarah, as the person who's telling the story, standing in the alley way. 

At first we were just a collection of strangers standing in an alley, almost as if we were waiting for a bus. then with the line 'suddenly youre in the wrong place' and a kick on the box me two of us turned to sarah backing her into the wall and trying to create a visual embodiment of the line 'a burrow between buildings' the scene was slow and quiet and as it looked like the two characters were going to hurt sarahs character, Alex (playing michellle) screamed as nina snatched her bag. We tried to use contrast in levels and volume to make the piece feel edgy and effective but as ive previously mentioned i don't think we were particularly sucessful.

We ran out of time to see the others perform their work, but i think with more time we all could have produced really effective pieces if theatre. I think that its important to sometimes use basic sounds and movement in place of lines and traditional theatre because it gives you a fresh perspective on the piece and the sounds and movement WITH the lines make a more effectve and  three dimensional piece of theatre. It means that the audience can not only sympathise with the characters and their situation but they can sympathise with the mood of the piece or with the atmosphere of the settings. 

Exploring the Taxi Driver

To further explore the character of the taxi driver we did a whole class hot seat which is an effective technique because in order to be 'hot seated' effectivley you have to make decisions about the character you are portraying, as we did this as a whole class the decisions people made were adopted by the rest of the class and we had a cohesive idea of who the taxi driver was. in the whole class hot seat we learned that though the taxi driver has a fairly mundane day job on the weekend he loves playing golf, his favourite club being the shiny one, and prefers Star Wars over Star Trek. i asked questions like where's the furthest yuve ever driven a passenger? and have you ever made friends in the cab?

After the hot seating we all became taxi drivers adding our own little quirks to the character. i made my taxi driver half asleep. he was fully hunched over the wheel and slurred all of his words together when he bothered to talk at all, mainly he would use his hands to communicate and stop the cab regularly to buy himself a coffee.

Other people in the class for example Benji, chose to be the polar opposite to what we'd imagine the cabbie as, he was a very camp taxi driver sat straight up in his chair with a very high dynamic voice. As an ensemble we all turned into certain poeples taxi drivers and it was amazing how in sync we were able to be while all having slightly different nuances in the same character. 

I think as a class we all work very well together because we are comfotable with each other and trust each other to take the scene to different places, i think that becoming our difeerent taxi drivers was really helpful because although we'd made some decisions about the character as a class its so interesting to see how many different ways the character can still be portrayed.

My response to the text

After reading the east end tales im not sure how i feel about it. On the surface its a play about life in a place where people have funny accents and swear a lot, but i'd argue that even deeper than the rasicm, domestic abuse and voilence this play confronts us with our shocking ability to normalise and skirt over massive human tradgedy. 

Particularly tale 5 where the start to the last paragrah is 'now dad can watch tv in peace' i personally found myself thiking about how much, or little i would be effected if a woman and two children were beaten to death next door to me. 

I think of all places the east end was an important one to document because not only is it a stereotypically british place but it is also a extremly racially diverse place, which makes it ideal to look at not only issues that are relevant in the east end but issues that are relevant all over the country.

As a play, i think the east end tales is very different because it's almost half way between being a series of monologues and being a collection of poems, its very different to the piece we looked at last term and almost allows for more creative license because there isn't any stage direction etc. 

Although the play brings to the forefront some very serious issues i think it almost allows us to find the humanity and comedy in the everyday misdemeanours of the characters, this is important because to some extent life can be shit, and we cant always wait for a policeman to show up and tell a guy off for using a racist term. I think the play illustrates that we do still have the ability to function with out the assistance of the authorities. We are not helpless.

My favourite tale was tale 3 because i think we can all identify with putting on some sort of a front or making an effort to be different either to disguise or forget somthing from our past or to convince ourselves that we are a different or better person. I think its very relateable because at some point in most of our lives we will have felt awful or will have done somthing awful or even have had somthing awful done to us, and at that moment or maybe even now still we will have felt like a lost little boy. I think Kennedy does an amazing job of taking not necessarily relatable situations and making the reader relate to an aspect of the character. 

i was not there for the first lesson so i did not get to explore a tale within a group.