We then reviewed the progress we have made so far in a group discussion.
Once we had done so, we realized that we really needed to come up with a plot. After some more discussion, we ended up with a basic five point plot:
1- Wedding planning
2- The lies
3- The fight
4- Wedding is cancelled
5- Everyone finds that their loyalty lies with themselves - wholesome end??
We then developed each of these a bit more.
1. Wedding planning. Here we see that Harry is obsessively in love with Meredith, who is a total control freak. Charles is also in love with Meredith and holds a grudge against Harry for stealing his opportunity. Could the engagement announcement be the trigger for his manipulations, ie if he's not happy no one else can be? We open with the movement sequence, the yoga/gym scenes, more movement. It introduces and shows relationships through the wedding planner, like in the opening of the Gdansk episode of John Finnemore's souvenir programme?, shows the friends' reactions to Meredith, and a includes a scene where Charles is asked to be the best man.
To help with this, Louis, Tristan and I improvised a scene to show Harry asking Charles to be the best man and being interrupted by Meredith. The things we liked about this scene were:
- the continuous misunderstanding between the two men - a holiday to Spain and best man duties
- Meredith's entrance and total intolerance of Charles
- the stress-relief harmonizing
After this scene, we could have a monologue from Charles to show his duplicitous ways, like Iago's soliloquies from Othello.
2. The lies. Here, Charles' plan is put into action as he spreads lies a bit like a modern-day Othello as all seed of doubt are planted by Charles. To help with ideas, Emma, Silvana, Seth and Hugo went off and brainstormed. These would be situations that could either be suspicious or completely innocent with a good answer. This is what they came back with:
- Meredith has been seen by an unknown person with the barman
- Frederick has been giving her free drinks
- they seemed to be all over each other
- he took her up to his room
- instead of going to yoga class, she goes to meet her lover
- she can't keep her legs closed
- Frederick keeps winking at her from across the room
- she actually eats meat
Some other things that could pick at Harry's trust could be:
- smelling her perfume on Fred
- her phone gets a message from Fred
- he finds some clothes that aren't his
- her yoga teacher texts asking why she hasn't been coming
- she gets a message from a unisex name like 'Leslie' or 'Charlie' or 'Alex'
- gets a message from Fred saying she left her bag at his
- Fred says something flirty/personal while pouring drinks
- Charles introduced Meredith to Harry, who was supposed to be his wingman but he 'stole' her
- Harry at the bar sees Fred's phone get a message from 'M', thinks it is Meredith but it is actually Marie
All these things build up and convince Harry more and more that she is unfaithful, but so much so that he loses sight of where his loyalties lie.
3. The fight. This is the climax of the piece where Harry finally confronts Meredith, realizes she is innocent and so is Frederick, and goes to confront Charles instead. Their fight can be shown through physical theatre.
4. Harry is left alone. When Meredith hears about the fight, she is upset and cancels the wedding. This means that Harry is lonely and sad, which we were thinking could be shown by the Frantic Assembly technique 'Swindon Five', with Harry in the middle looking lost.
5. Resolution. The characters realize that loyalty lies within themselves, resulting in a natural, bittersweet separation. This could be shown with a closing monologue by James, while the others do physical theatre about what everyone is up to-- like at the end of makeover shows they do a 'Here's what they are up to now!' bit.
We began the afternoon with a thorough physical warm-up using the foam dice. We took it in turns to throw two dice, one with different time limits on it, and the other with various exercises such as walking lunges, press-ups and squats. After a few rounds of this, we began thinking of ways to develop the opening scene.
We split into two groups - three girls and the five boys. These groups were then tasked with creating an improvisation surrounding Meredith and Harry prior to their engagement.
The scene us girls came up with was set in Meredith's yoga class where the other girls were sent by Harry to find out her ring size. Squeezing the air out of this scene while we developed it took a while as there was a lot of unintentional 'um's and 'er's, however once we managed this it flowed much better and had the fast-paced comedic element we want to incorporate throughout the piece.
The things we liked from this scene was:
- Meredith's cold nature and intolerance
- The sharp contrast of personalities
- Silvana's character just completely giving up and accidentally letting slip.
While we were doing this, the boys were creating a scene where I tell my friends that I wants to propose to Meredith. This scene also took a bit of time to get it to work properly but in the end it went well.
The idea is to go straight from the opening movement sequence into the yoga class scene with the girls. From there it will go into the scene with the boys so that all the things they say about Meredith can be seen by the audience beforehand so they get the jokes made about her.
Once we had reached a point where everyone was happy with the scenes, we decided to try and go into another movement sequence to show Charles trying to deceive my character and flirt with Meredith, and also to show the passage of time. This was easier said than done, as we initially just talked over ideas and shut down other peoples' by pointing out how they could feasibly go wrong. This went on for maybe five minutes and we weren't getting anywhere, so we had a couple of rounds of 'Yes, and.'. This is an improvisation game that opens peoples' minds to new ideas as they literally cannot say no to anything. At first it felt a bit weird, but we soon got into it and we could tell our improvisation brains were working better.
Now that we had overcome this block, we decided to revisit some ideas mentioned before. Going off this, we began in our two groups of boys and girls. We spent five minutes developing a short movement sequence.
Amelie leans forward propped up on the others' hands, they push her back from 'escaping my relationship', she grabs their arms and they twist under and block her once again. They spin her towards centre stage and push Amelie towards me
.
One incident occurred in the boys' rehearsal as, once again, Tristan got mildly injured. This evidently needs to be avoided in the real thing, so we need to work on using the same force each time they run it through.
We tried merging our two movement sequences together, and ended up with the following:
From where they push Amelie, she does the run & lean move on Tristan, and go under his arm towards me. They do their hand-on-cheek-etc. thing, but from where Tristan spins Amelie, she pulls him along with her and he ends up on one knee.
One problem we encountered was that Seth and James were standing in such a position that they blocked the short 'engagement move' from being seen. We need to find a way to have them move away from centre stage without directing the main attention away from what Amelie and I are doing.
Finally, we looked at James' opening monologue as we haven't spent much time on it. The only thing is, he is a little daunted at the prospect which makes it a bit difficult to develop. The main thing we did do was discuss ideas once more about what he should say. In the end he speed-wrote a monologue which ended up being quite good. The only thing we need to do now is edit it as we develop more and more events plot-wise.
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