SPA- Chasing Pavements -5

After starting todays lesson with an in depth discussion on what we would actually want our piece to be about we came up with a completely new approach. We have decided to play four different people, showing our thoughts and different memories of a person whom had recently died, who we all had different relations with but were all just as close with. I think this could be an interesting, heart felt piece, especially as each of us are going to direct our characters scenes, having the others in the group play people who have relations with their character. We have decided that we will start and end our piece with the same short scene of our main characters at the person’s funeral. I suggested that we repeat the scene as at the beginning, four people at any person’s funeral wouldn’t mean much, but at the end of our piece they should have a perfect vision of what this person was like, and how much they meant to people.   

The others in my group then suggested that we should stick with this idea, but make it a Comedy. Or though it could be effective (for example when showing flashbacks of their memories, and in the variation in characters (so that the audience can identify with them)), I personally feel that Comedy is one of the harder genres to perform well, as peoples senses of humour are so varied and if not well planned and written then often things that are intended to be funny (but are not) get took as personally / as offensive or are simply cringe worthy and uncomfortable to watch. However it is a genre that none of us have explored as much as we would like to, therefore we are going to make our piece a comedy.

We were about to start creating our character profiles (and character profiles for the others in our piece), but I thought it would make more sense if we knew about the person our piece will essentially be based around, the person who is dead. So, each of us decided different components of our person and this is who we have created;

Name; John David

Features; Black hair, Brown eyes, tanned, slim, tall

Ethnicity; White, British

Lives; Liverpool

Age; 32

Relationship Status; Divorced, from a marriage of 10 years

Job; Accountant, studied at university in London

Cause of death; Auto Erotic Assimilation

Music taste; House

Ollie’s characters & relations; He was friends with John at university, he lives with his wife (played by Cel), they have one boy (played by James) and one girl (played by yours truly).

Cel’s characters & relations; She was the younger sister of John, who lives with her boyfriend (Ollie), who have their two friends over (James and I).

James’ characters & relations; He was the nephew of John, has a boyfriend (played by Ollie), his best friend (played by Cel) and a step-sister (played by myself).  

My characters & relations; I am John’s childhood best-friend, who lives with my husband (played by Ollie) and have two children (played by Cel and James).

For next lesson, we will show each other our character profiles and give a brief description on how we would like our characters to be played.  

My Character;

Name; Amy Elizabeth Carter

Ethnicity; White, British

Age; 30 Date of birth; 07/01/1986

Features; Brown hair, Green eyes, short, slim

Relationship status; Happily married for 5 years to Glen Carter

Lives; Everton, Liverpool - also born here

Children; Liam Carter (10 years old) and Lucy Carter (7 years old)

Pets; One Dalmatian named Bruce

Work; Receptionist at a magazine headquarters, studied in London with John

Music taste; Alternative rock and indie rock

Likes; The colour blue, any type of food, reality tv, baking

Dislikes; cold weather, mess, politicians

Glen Carter / Ollies profile; has also known me since we were children, very sarcastic and dry but also caring and loving, good father, hates working as a mechanic.

Liam Carter / James; is athletic / enjoys all sport and annoying his sister, hates school, has recently started to get in a lot of trouble due to his friends, close with his mum but not his dad.

Lucy Carter / Cel; constantly has tantrums, daddy’s girl, is extremely smart for her age, doesn’t have many friends but prefers to spend her time drawing and painting.