Evaluation

When we started devising practical work our teacher showed us clips from The Nightmare before Christmas, he then went on to show us a practitioner called Antonin Artaud and how he believed that theatre should have elements of reality in order to have the maximal effect on the audience. Antonin's theory was to bring people's deepest fears to life. He did this by making people feel anxious, disturbed and queasy. He also liked to use disturbing sound and lighting as well as other performing elements.

As well as working with Antonin’s theory we were asked to base our performance on Timothy Burton’s The Nightmare before Christmas and make the story more abnormal. We used the characters for The Nightmare before Christmas as a starting point for our character development.

To help us get an idea on how to be successful with this unit, we were shown videos via YouTube of multiple A-level performance, for example, 4.48 Psychosis. After watching 4.48 Psychosis it made me realize that we had to push ourselvess beyond our comfort zone, as well as the audience.

We performed our monologues in the style of  installation theatre, which is about taking over a certain space and making it performable, therefore we decided to take over the flyovers.

I requested for the character Doctor Finkelstein, which I was later given, I stared create my monologue around Ian Brady and Harold Shipman. After writing the monologue and a discussion with Head of Drama, it was clear that the amount of detail in my monologue was not appropriate. During the preparation I unified scene with Lock and Shocks, I had to change some of my monologue for this to work. I continued to bases my monologue on Ian Brady, however when changing my monologue I forgot about Harold Shipman and the fact that Finkelsteinis a doctor, so I need to incorporate this in to my character. Lock and Shocks monologues were based on Myra Hindley. Lock and Shocks monologues were seen from two different perspectives, almost as if Myra Hindley had a split personality. Writing the monologues was the most challenging part of the unit, after writing the monologue our scene had to be rewritten several times to make it appropriate for our audience. Later on in the preparation we realized that our monologues we based too much on reality, we need to make it more surreal in order to meet the brief  for this unit.

I know the difference between right and wrong and I know for a fact that what I did wasn't wrong. The murders were all a part of my fantasies, I already had the scripts. I just need those two to help me fulfil my dreams. If they refused to give me what I want, I was going to take it by force. I was going to strip them of their dignity if I had to.

The reason why I abused my powers as a doctor are personal and private to me, and I'm never going to give that up. You will never know the know the truth. All I can say is that I have been killing people for years. In some ways I guess you could call me a psychopath because I needed harts.

It was the killing - the point of death - the harts - that interested me.

Our audience was full of compliments and we revised grate feedback.

Throughout the unit, I personally think that I have developed my ability to create characters and relate to them in a way that I have never down before.