Scripted: Day two


We started by finishing off reading through the play and briefly discussed staging ideas. We thought the best way would be to perform in a Proscenium Arch on the floor of the hall. Being on the stage would mean that the intimacy with he audience would be lost, we wanted to keep them close to ensure they would be engrossed in the production, as if they are watching a group of adolescents chatting as if they too, were at school.

In terms of set, we researched the play and found out that it was set in one permanent setting, which was the sixth form library. However, the library was a very old fashioned wooden one, clearly of prestige and honour, so we will have to think carefully about how we want our set to look. In terms of the structure though, we decided that we will have flats running across the back of the stage and either wall paper a book shelf on or paint them on, depending on what we have available to us. We would have a table in the centre of the stage and a circular table to the left, allowing the right hand side to be open to walk on from. In addition, this way of staging would give five different entrances/exits, so we can vary where we come on and off from, as a normal school library would have various entrances and exits also.

The set for the show is as pictured below, as you can see it holds a sense of antiquity, something we need to replicate in which ever way we can. In fact, it holds similarities to Harry Potter, which may be something we look at though get the feel of the set right.

Scripted: Character Profile




My character in Punk Rock is Chadwick Meade ( a name American in origin). Having only read the script through once I've already got the impression that Chadwick is a quiet, intelligent young man. He doesn't seem too integrated in the social group of the sixth form, in fact he seems rather distant from everyone else. It is clear that he already has a very strained relationship with Bennett, who appears to bully him, however, through Chadwick's relaxed and fed up attitude towards him, I believe Chadwick see's himself above Bennett and doesn't waste his time engaging in conflict with him.




He undertakes himself in a very proper way, evident in the way he greets Lily, the new girl, with a handshake and polite conversation. To be brutally honest, Chadwick is a bit of a nerd, he specialises in maths and regularly adds some boring facts to a conversation. I also get the impression that Chadwick has a bit of a soft spot for Cissy, who is treated badly by her boyfriend, Bennett. I think he is capable of seeing that she is a sweet and intelligent girl underneath but is almost controlled by Bennett.




Below is a picture from the play, here Chadwick is being bullied by Bennett, he doesn't fight back, just gives in and takes it, in a way, he is a little weak physically, but mentally displays great resilience and patience.


In terms of how I interpret Chadwick, I can see him as the sort of boy who would rather stay indoors reading philosophical books or watching documentaries, and as an atheist, taking a particular interest in science and astronomy than going out and being part of a social group. I feel that he is introverted, however, knows how to act appropriately when engaged in social events.

Scripted: Setting the scene

As the original play is set in the North of England, we are already thinking of changing the location to a more local area as not everyone in the group is confident with putting on a northern accent. This will mean that many of the colloquial terms used in the north and featured in the play will have to be adapted and modernised to suit the area we are from, Kent, or at least somewhere in a relative distance to Kent.

Hence, I've decided to research an independent sixth form in the south that we could use as a potential setting for the piece. The sixth form I've decided to take a closure look at is The Kings School in Canterbury, a private school with only 817 pupils. Just by reading the schools ethos it is clear to me that they deem themselves as a very prestigious and proud group. They say that their main aim is to... "Anchor a 21st century education within the illustrious history of the oldest school in the country, dating from 597 A.D."

More specifically, they describe their sixth form as "Vibrant and Intellectually exciting" and  " Provides the ideal springboard for strong applications to Oxbridge, Russell Groups and other top UK universities"

The school is situated in a World Heritage site within the precincts of Canterbury Cathedral, the whole atmosphere surrounding the school is of intelligence. I can almost visualise and hear the posh accents of the students, accents and characteristic that we need to be able to replicate in our piece. We need to capture this confidence of the students that resonates from the environment they are in, our characters are all extremely intelligent and would have been capable of achieving high grades at such a school as Kings, and it is our job to convey these characters.

Punk Rock

Punk Rock was written by Simon Stephens and premiered at the royal exchange in 2009, but transferred to the lyric hammersmith. Set in a library of a private school in a Stockport. The play centres around the lives of students before their mock exams in November. Since it's opening it has been performed in various countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Wales and in the USA on Broadway. It highlights, the lives of young people at school and the struggles they face during the period.

Scripted: Day one

After a few lessons performing short scenes from various different plays, we were finally cast in our roles for this new unit. This time, the class has been split into two groups as we couldn't find a play that accommodated a cast of thirteen with three girls.

The play I'll be working on is Punk Rock, by Simon Stephens, which focuses on the lives of several pupils at a private sixth form. We started with a simple read through to get a feel for the play and to understand our roles. The character I will be playing is Chadwick Meade, who has a scholarship at the sixth form the play is set in. Personally, I'm quite excited about working on this play ad cannot wait to get stated properly, it seems very funny, yet dark with huge potential for us to make it original, stamping our own style on the play.

Devising: Evaluation

Last week, we performed our pieces to year 10 and 11 in front of the camera. I have to admit that I was pretty nervous about performing it to an audience as last years devising went tremendously well and we felt more ready to perform it, plus, we were more confident in our piece. I think the main reason for this was that we picked a much more sophisticated and mature topic to create a piece around. This topic was education and how the disciplinary sanctions and behaviour of schools have changed over the course of the last 100 years, and the possible futures of schools in the next generation or two. We took a great deal of inspiration from the play “Future Conditional,” which we saw as a class at the Old Vic in London this year. We loved the humorous side of the show and wanted to replicate a piece like that, exploring deep issues within education and how we could combat these issues. We wanted to create a piece which showed off our maturity and sophistication. For example, we spent a lot of time writing various scripts for our meeting scenes.

This entailed a lot of research, picking out different quotes and real life statistics which we could use in our piece to create the illusion that the piece was real rather than fictitious.

Creating quality dialogue was the main problem, none of us had ever really written a script before, let alone the four we eventually used in our piece. I had written one back in year 10 but most of us were used to improvising scenes and gradually tweaking them and committing them to memory. As the only A level English student in the group I took lead on the script front, while others contributed with ideas. The part I found most difficult was nit the actual content of the script, I had an abundance of quotes and stats to my disposal, and the direction the piece was moving in, but trying to match the lines with the right character was hard. We all developed and discussed the different characters each of us would play, based around the stereotypical characters in a meeting scene. Forexample, we had one person arrive late, the one who takes it very seriously, the more outgoing one and so on, so fitting the lines to match was difficult, particularly as we wanted to make our scenes serious, yet comical giving a real insight into a school teacher meeting. I've forgotten the amount of time we spent writing scripts and performing them to our teacher so we could annotate and re draft the script.., however, I feel that these workshop sessions with our script allowed us to make changes to allow the dialogue to flow more, emphasise our different characters and create a more accurate meeting atmosphere. In hindsight, I think we spent a little too long on the scripts and redrafting them when we could have been running through the scenes, giving us a better understanding of our lines so we didn’t panic about learning them a week before the show. Having said that, I think we pulled it off very well though, we got laughs where we expected them and managed to improvise to add some comedy which worked very well for our particular audience. I believe I’m correct in saying that one of the year 10’s admitted they would have paid to have watched us of we were professional, just wanted it to be longer, which, perhaps, we could have made longer if we weren’t conscious of the time restraints of 5 minutes per person. Either way, this was an incredibly encouraging comment and filled us with pride and reassured us that what we had created was both en capturing and comical at times, whilst providing a storyline that the audience could follow and understand easily. 

I think a strong point in our piece was the quality of our scenes, from the sound scape, to the dialogue and movement. I think they all showed off different skills and our adaptability as a group as well as the maturity and sophistication we endeavoured so hard to show. Our movement pieces were more planned than before, introducing chairography was a completely new thing for me, but I think it worked nicely and wasn’t too difficult to pull off. The planning of the movement pieces made it much easier to devise a piece and stick to it. We spent a lot of time trying to think of effective and stylistic movements we could use in our performance. This wasn’t always easy. For one particular movement scene, we created one piece, felt as if it was extremely dull and boring and went onto create a new one. Although our feedback suggested that our previous one was better, hence we tried to merge the two pieces into one for our finished product. We achieved this,   but stupidly, didn’t record it, so when we revisited the scene a few weeks later, we had forgotten, therefore had to spend time trying to remember the steps. This was a waste of time and had we have recorded it, would have allowed us to focus on other areas.

Another positive in our decision making process was the fact that we all decided on costumes withinaround ten minutes. We all agreed to wear business style clothing to replicate a teacher look and to just scruff it up when playing students. This was very practical as our traverse stage had no where to get changed and it would have taken too long anyway. So our costume changes were smooth and quick, allowing us to worry about the performance and not whether or not we would have time to get the right clothing on. We did miss one piece of costume however, which was the robe we wanted someone to wear for the Victorian teacher scene. This was only a minor issue though as the piece ran as smoothly without it, and if I’m honest wouldn’t have really made any difference good or bad. 

One of the main issues we faced as a group was one of our group members needing to take two weeks off for an operation. We always knew this so we tried to get all our movement pieces set before he left, which we achieved, but needed to finish all our scripts in time, which we got to him one week before the performance, which probably, wasn’t enough time as we only had two lessons with him when he came back before the actual performance. The scripts should have been completed much quicker, however, I suppose we spent so much time on them as they were a feature point of our performance and we wanted the dialogue to be meaningful and have quality. I think the main negative in the absence of our member was the lack of rehearsal time we had leading up to the performance. In the last week, we had pretty much everything finished, bar the lighting and sound, yet we couldn’t rehearse properly without him. We saw this opportunity to get the more technological aspects sorted. We recorded the sounds we wanted for our sound scape and put them onto “Audacity” which allowed us to layer all our recordings of typical classroom sounds together, whilst adding in other sounds such as a drum beat or ringing. Whilst our member was off he devised a lighting plan for himself so he could come in and crack on with it straight away. I made a decision to make a last minute lighting change for the scene where my character gets caned. Originally, we had a series of quick blackouts to accompany a whip sound, and every time the lights came back up the whole cast had moved into the same position as if they had been struck, we didn’t have time to have ever set this, or have enough time with he lighting to get our timings right. Therefore, we thought a blackout with the cane sound would be easy, avoid any confusion and work well. Ideally, we would have loved to have had time to add in cool lighting effects and strobes, but we did not have enough time to practice it. Nevertheless, I was still proud of how we encountered such problems and dealt with them, and how we used our time as effectively as we could.

Last time we undertook a devising unit, we didn’t really think of staging it any differently from what we had been used to, which was the traditional proscenium arch layout. However, this time, both groups decided to change this. After watching a performance of the Black Watch by BBC Scotland, we decided that we wanted to stage our own piece in the traverse style, not only because it was a style that interested us, but because it was different from what we had done before and presented anew challenge for us in terms of how we staged our scenes, which turned out to be more difficult than we previously imagined. Time and time again we had to change the way we staged certain scenes to make sure that the majority of the audience could see what was happening. Of course, no matter where you are on the stage there will always be a section of the audience that your back is turned upon, so we had to think carefully about how we were standing or how we positioned our chairs in our meeting scenes as we sat down during most of the performance. One particular problem we encountered was our first movement scene, where we had an arch of chairs positioned in the middle of the stage. This meant that the audience behind us would not be able to see any of our faces or actions and would be cut out of the performance essentially, hence, we had to set the chairs at one end of the stage so all could where we were, and be a art of the scene as a result. In fact, we had to tweak the positioning of most scenes to ensure that the whole audience had clear view of at least one of us from different angles. This was a completely different challenge to what we had experienced before, to be honest, I don’t think we even thought about how difficult the staging was. Nevertheless, it soon occurred to us that we needed to give careful consideration to the staging, and I think we came up with good solutions that reflected our conscious effort to stage effectively. 

In conclusion, I feel that we done a very good job of creating a sophisticated and mature piece. I feltas if we researched well to come up with a range ideas and slowly build upon our research to create the most interesting and complex scenes we have ever attempted to put together.  We worked very efficiently as a team, never arguing, but discussing maturely to express our ideas and feelings. Although we encountered problems, we dealt with them as best we could and the end product, was actually something to be proud of. I think one area that could have been dealt more professionally was the speed at which we formed our performance. I think we spent way too long trying to write our scripts and this limited our rehearsal time, so in future, I think this area will need to be improved, whether that be spending ore time out of lesson or improvising more.