From the beginning of the course, we had been looking at many different extracts from plays. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, Teechers by John Godber and Shadow Of A Gunman by Sean O’Cossey to name a few. During the first part of unit two, we were told that we were going to be looking at the play Teechers. I was very pleased because I personally enjoyed Teechers the most because it was fun and exciting. I was looking very forward to the following six weeks as because I had never studied an entire play before.
Teechers is a play written by John Godber who was the head teacher of drama.
The whole truck theatre company first performed this play on the 9th August 1987 at the Edinghborough fringe festival. The play is set in the 1980’s. During the first week of our six-week course, we firstly found out a little bit of background information about the play then we made a start on reading the play.
We started of at reading it line by line while sitting in a semi-circle but then we moved on and started speaking as different characters and we were able to understand what characteristics each character had. We would then go off the script and discuss certain aspects of the scene and marking the moment.
We were able to identify the climax and anti climax of the play and we understood that the play was a play within a play. That is it was about the students making a play.
During this first week we identified characters that we liked and were able to talk about their characteristics, we were also identify scenes that we liked and the themes that were there in the play. The themes that we identified straight away was money, this play is based on students who go to a state school with parents who have a low income and they are always wishing that they were in the private school saint George’s which had good facilities.
This is similar to a book written by Jacqueline Wilson, this story is about twins and one is offered a place in a private school while the other is in a state school, the girl who is left in state school is let down by society because she knows that she will not get as many opportunities as her sister after education because she will not be a qualified and may not even want to be excepted by big companies. Another theme we came across was opportunities.
This play showed that the students in the play knew that in the future they would not get a good job with a good pay because they went to a school that was downmarket and not good education. The explorative strategy was marking the moment as I have discussed above and this helped us the understand the text more because we were able to read in-between the lines and understand there was more to it than just a play or a line, it all has meaning behind it and we can understand this by reading in between the lines.
In the second week of the six-week programme, we looked at the text in more detail by choosing extracts from it. We picked parts of the play that we enjoyed the most and we used role-play to act them out. Some of the extracts we looked at in this lesson were the school disco, the introduction of Ogy Moxon and the ninja scene. We picked these because when we read it in the previous class we really enjoyed these scenes and they would look good because it used a lot of action and energy. We then split into groups and decided which extract we wanted to perform.
The group I was in decided to do the ninja scene whereas the other group done the scene when Ogy Moxon was introduced. In our group, there were four of us and it struck to our mind that in the scene there were only three characters therefore we needed to cut down the lines and make it into a scene that does include all four of us. We learnt that although it has been written as three people it could very easily be turned into 4 people by sharing the lines. We tried to keep props to a minimum and made physical theatre, e. g. wo actors using their hands make a door or a poster is made by a few actors making a still image of the poster. While role-playing we realised that we needed to make use of the space effectively so that all the action is not occurring at the centre or right at the side; it should be evenly spaced and were people stands influence this because enemies would not e close together and the audience will be able to pick this up. While we were practising the role-play, we noticed that it was directed as Gail using a French accent while delivering the line.
This made us understand that by using different accents we can distinguish that in a play within a play the audience understands when the play is being acted inside the play and when Gail is again a student. At the end of this week, we took a highlighter each and as a group we highlighted all the bits that we liked in the play, which were our favourite scenes and then we divided these scenes into chunks and tried to fit all our favourite bits to make it into a new short story.
This extract from our favourite bits in the play gave us a new story which we were going to use to develop our piece into the In the third week of the six-week programme, we were given the characters that we were going to play for the ten-minute extract that we were going to perform. Although we were already given set characters we still explored other characters through thought tracking and hot seating.
We firstly read through the shortened version of the play speaking the lines we were going to say in the performance but then after that we split up into groups of three’s and we practised the scene between Mrs Parry, Mr Nixon and Mr Basford. After practising this we showed our piece to the other groups and in the middle any member was able to stop us and were able to ask us questions about the thoughts of the character we were playing, this was a thought tracking exercise and by this we were able to really understand the characters and we were able to think not as ourselves but as the character we were taking on.
After we completed this exercise, we looked at the script once more and we came across the line: “we were bored and disinterested. ” We then we wondering why the students were bored and disinterested because usually students are happy when they get new teachers but then we made up an extra dialogue saying why they were bored and disinterested and we imagined this was because within 4 weeks they had seen of 6 teachers because they all gave up on them.
The last thing we done in the week was looking at the explorative strategy of narration. In the play we had already appreciated that it was a play within a play and now after understanding the text a lot more we have understood that while the play is going on within the play the characters snap out of their role and narrate to the audience.
We looked through the text and underlined wherever narration was present and we looked at them in more depth and decided what type of actions we could include to make it more lively and also make the audience understand that the character has snapped out of his or her role and is delivering to the audience, and we understood that this can be done by various ways including change in voice, change in appearance e. g. putting on a scarf or removing a hat etc. r change in gesture, different attitude etc. The fourth week of our programme was mainly spent on costume, music and the opening sequence, but we used the explorative strategy of hot seating to find out about the characters in more depth, this is similar to thought tracking but thought tracking is finding out exactly what the character is thinking at that particular time whereas hot seating is asking several questions to the character to find out what the character is like.
Some questions that were asked during this exercise was what the characters intended to do after school, what were their thoughts on the new teacher Mr. Nixon, why did they think they were let down by society, what type of clothes would they wear to suit their character e. g. loose clothes to show they are laid back, fancy clothes to show that they are particular about the way they look etc. The fifth week of the programme was the full rehearsal of the short extract that we had been working on for performance.
During this week we really focused on how to bring the play to an end (how to bring it to an anti climax) we focused on the locker sequence because that was something which was quite rusty because we did not really practise for that for long and we also had a look at the staging of the timetable as it was not looking good and that is why we decided to change the staging of it so that it would look much better.
During this week, we decided that we would use cross cutting near the end of the extract to cut from one lesson to another to another and then back to the beginning, this was so that at one time the audience would be able to see how differently the students were in different classes because they had different teachers some who were strict whereas some were not strict and the students would muck around in that lesson.
The last lesson of the programme was after the extract was performed. This was an evaluation lesson and we evaluated our work. We appreciated that our performance was very good and it pulled of well. We also engaged the audience well and they were seated on all three sides therefore we made sure that all of them could see it and they were also involved in the play.
Performing to an audience was the first time we had done it in this course throughout the year and it was a very good experience as well as frightening, the five minutes before the performance we were at a stage where we as a group thought we would not be able to pull this off but once it started we were ok and it really did go well despite the adrenaline rush, but doing this really did boost my confidence and I think it boosted everyone’s confidence as well because we now know what it feels like to perform in front of an audience and this will help us with our devised work which we will be doing later on in the term.
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