Devising: Day 16

Having previously polished our script, we decided that we needed to move on and work on something else. At the end of our script we planned to move into a Victorian school scene, to do this we decided to use our soundscape of an everyday modern school  to fuse as a transition into the Victorian school. The only problem was ... What were going to do?

Having taken a lot of inspiration from Future Conditional, which we saw last month, we searched for interviews with the cast. Below is an interview with Rob Brydon, in which he talks about his role as a teacher. We thought that this may be helpful in getting an idea for how teachers feel or what they feel obliged to do.

As our boardroom scenes were going to be all dialogue based  we wanted to avoid another dialogue scene. We thought about a silent movie style story, projecting a filmed  scene on the screen, but didn't really favour this idea.

As we didn't really know what Victorian schools were like, we researched education in Victorian England. The research follows below.

 

 

By looking at this information, we could gain an understanding of how a Victorian school worked. What punishments were like, what they wrote on, what teachers were like, the setting and so on. From this we began to generate a few ideas of how we wanted to show a punishment.  We did discuss whether we would have to cut our girl out of the scene and make her play the teacher as boys and girls were separated in class, however, as our piece was going to be rather movement based and not particularly realistic, we opted against it and decided that the character proposing the Victorian idea as the teacher.

The main question I asked myself was what we were trying to show. The main point was one of the characters in the meeting trying to convey how a Victorian system would benefit the modern education system. Therefore, we needed to show how the pupils were controlled and how they feared the teacher.

Below is a picture taken from a Victorian classroom, this really emphasises the control and rigid structure of the classroom. Something that we hope to replicate in our own performance. With the teacher at the front almost dictating to the pupils.