“Find Me” by Olwen Wymark

In this essay I will be comparing my devised performance of the “Cry Me a River” unit, preformed on 11th May 2006, with my scripted performance of “Find Me” written by Olwen Wymark, which was preformed on the 2nd October 2006. I will be comparing character, style, mood, design, music, and lighting.

For style I will be deciding which theatrical method is used, Stanislavski’s or Brecht’s Method. Brecht believed in breaking the fourth wall and trying to make the play as unrealistic as possible by using flash backs, monologues, freeze frames, placards ect.

But on the other hand Stanislavski thought differently he believed in making the play as realistic as possible to make the audience believe that they were not watching a play but actually watching real life events he achieved this by having every thing in chronological order and making it as naturalistic as possible making by making the actors think like their character would, by making the actors consider the “Magic If” – if this was REAL how would I react?, also Stanislavski believed in the 4th wall, the fourth wall was used to make the play seem more realistic by acting as if the audience was not there. We use this technique allot to make plays more realistic.

We created the “Find Me” performance based on the script by Olwen Wymark, in the performance I played a man in his late 30s called Edward. He is the father of a disturbed child verity. During the interview at the start of the play he continuously tries to avoid the fact that there is something wrong with her by continuously striving to excuse her abnormal behavior. We preformed the piece in Brechtian style, and broke the 4th wall using flashbacks and monologues, this helped the audience understand what had lead to the interview at the start. Lighting was an important part of the play, although we did not change the lighting in the play, we only had a single spotlight in the centre of the stage, this type of lighting helped the audience to concentrate on the play and calm the audience, so that there would be a greater effect on them in the louder more active scene.

The language used was formal for the interview section and the rest of the play was informal. We used music to introduce and end the play, we used “Just Want you to Know” by the Backstreet boys be cause the tempo and lyrics suited the style and mood of our play. Before the flash back we used Kids Game from the Blood Brothers soundtrack, the song suited the play because the lyrics was kids singing about games, and this was just before the flash back when verity is a child. We had a very basic set we only had a single stool, and the only props we had were some basic wooden toys and a clipboard. We only had one blackout. The play was preformed extremely well in exception of one line that was missed.

The play “Cry me a river” was developed to the stimulus of the song “Cry me a river” which was originally sung by Julie London. The play has an angry and upset mood throughout, and deals with the issue arising in the underground lifestyle of London in the 1950s. I believe that this play was based upon Brecht’s Method of acting because the play is not very realistic and was continuously breaking the “4th Wall” through the continual use of monologues, flashbacks and freeze frames.

To show that the play was based on the stimulus of “Cry me a river” one member of my group was required to sing the song.

I adopted the role of Charlie who was the owner of a underground prostitution club I was required to be a very cruel person to all of my staff, I had to make my daughter believe that I was a nice person, but when she dressed as a whore, and when I saw Elisa with her and took the blame out on her and tried to kill her with a base ball bat, this is when I am shot by my No.1 prostitute to stop me killing her friend.

We played the stimulus at the beginning and it was sung at the end.

We had a complex set that required long scene changes, lots of blackouts were incorporated.

The performances are quite alike in mood but have a completely different story line. The greatest difference is the practitioner’s methods that were used. The performances used both the methods of Stanislavski and Brecht and used the techniques required for each method to create the correct effect on the audience.