This part of my study on "Blood Brothers" is the development phase and aims to show my understanding of the characters.
Our task was to stage the opening scene of "Blood Brothers" using our knowledge of characters, plot, the drama elements and medium to do so. This was an interesting scene to stage because it was the first scene and it explained what the play was going to be about. The opening scene is a flashback. This was an effective strategy to employ because you know how the play would end up but now you want to find out what lead up to it and how it happened. I wanted the scene to show the main purpose of the play to the audience.
The first thing we did was listen to the music from the opening scene. The atmosphere this music created was very dismal. We decided to use the music in our scene because it would help cultivate the scene and help the audience understand what is trying to be said and the mood that we are trying to set.
We then looked at the characters; the main character was the narrator. I believe he represented fate and was able to add to the story line because he always reminded the characters of their guilt and fate catching up with them. The characters in our scene were Mrs Johnstone, Mrs Lyons, Edward, Linda and Mickey.
To delve into the characters more we used hot seating and asked the characters questions about themselves and their lives this helped us to do the gingerbreads of them.
We wanted to show the darkness of the opening speech by the narrator so we made a semi-circle of unrelated characters this represented the way the characters were trapped in their social class. We centred our actions around the narrator and acted out what he was saying. This was to show he was the instigator of what was happening.
The performance was well planned but when the brothers met in the middle of the semi-circle Mrs johnstone had to pull Edward aside and made it look a bit messy so we should have worked on the flow of our actions.
