Devising

In one of our lessons we a small amount of time to look at our stimulus and to create a short theatrical piece to go with it. At this point our stimulus was only the picture of Myra Hindley as we hadn’t started our research, however we did know a brief background to what they had done and the crime they had committed all we didn’t know was the details. With this information and stimulus we created a physical piece of theatre, which looked at the manipulation that they had on the children and how they controlled them and abused them as they had all the power.

 

We used the idea of puppets to show the power and control that they had over the children. It started by having four of the actors lying on the floor with two of us in the middle, being the couple. We started of the piece with the couple holding hands, we thought this showed unity and it lead the audience into a false sense of security of a romantic setting or a piece about a loving couple. We did this because to the outside world when the murders were taking place, they could have seemed like an ordinary couple, and we were showing the deceit by deceiving the audience. Then the couple went to each actor on the floor and started to pick them up, we started to mould them into different child like positions, such as crying or clapping, however they moved very robotically. We did this because it showed how the children had been stripped of their childhood and even if they were to play or look like children, they would empty and mechanical inside as the couple had taken away and manipulated their souls.

 

We then used an adaptation of this in our final piece of theatre as we thought it demonstrated the horror that the children had gone through, in an abstract, theatrical way.

 

One of the main things in our group we wanted to do was to show the horribleness of their crime but to also show the romantic side of their relationship and to show them as humans and an ordinary couple. We wanted to do this to challenge the audience as we felt it would make them look at the couple in another light and in a weird way connect to them, which would hopefully leave them confused as morally and instinctively they would hate and be disgusted by their crime, but learning about their personal lives could lead them to connect to them. We thought it was interesting to look at them as humans and to show that there is horrible and dirtiness in everyone but also there is a love in all, even if that love is messed up and only makes sense to the people in the relationship. We did this by having all the children turn into the couples thoughts and to go around the audience saying things such as “do you know what sex is” and “I don’t want to hurt you”, this was so that the audience could be inside their minds and hear what was happening to the children. As the actors would be saying this directly to the audience they could experience first hand the horrible acts that had been committed and hopefully even scare them. However then we contrasted this with the couple’s first meeting, where we physically showed the instant passion and romance with in them. We experimented with an exercise where one person try’s to kiss the other, and the other person at the last minute moves away. However the way we did was in a flirty, sensual way so that you could see the intense emotions and love building inside of them. We though that this would take the audience on an emotional journey of hating the couple to being taken in by their romance and pure love for each other. We deliberately took each part to the extreme, make the love really romantic and the child taking scenes really disturbing, to hopefully really challenge the audience and to take them into a completely different world where they were constantly enthralled in emotion and action.

 

When going into our site the audience come down a set of stairs, and then we want them in a circle around us, so that they can move in and out of the action happening as they wish. We would start the action as soon as the first audience member came down the stairs. This is so that the audience felt like they were walking into a completely different world and so that the atmosphere almost hit them straight away. We wanted them to be able to move around so it was as if they were inside the couples mind, this would especially take place in the scenes where their thoughts were being spoken. Also we felt like it would bring them into the action being played out and make them part of the performance.

 

We have made our piece of theatre non linear, so there is no real beginning, middle or end. This has allowed us to experiment with different forms of acting as well. Part of our pieces is very abstract and physical theatre, while other parts are naturalistic. The naturalistic piece that we are doing is a scene in a police station. One of the reasons was so that it would break up the performance and the audience could go on another journey as they would learn more about the characters in the naturalistic scenes and they verbal attitude. However the abstract parts express the emotions more powerfully and the themes of manipulation and love can come across a lot more strongly. I hope that this will have a really interesting effect on the audience as some part, like the abstract bits they will all have different interpretations on, and the naturalistic bit will make them learn more about the characters as humans.