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The Play that Goes Wrong performing at The Royal Variety Performance 2015

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The clip here is a brief version of The Play That Goes Wrong, this has given myself and the group the foundation of what to base our style of play on. Furthermore, it'll help give inspiration on the type of character's/people we wish to create for our production, since this is a show where the actor's have created character's for their roles within the play, giving even more creative liberty in how we create this play.

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Since I am not the greatest at comedy, I decided to look at the basics of how to write a good comedy, or what makes a good one. By learning and following/referring to the five fundamental steps in this guide, it will be a big help in writing our script, specifically the moments when things start to go wrong. It's helped me understand that comedy is something that can't always be done simply, it requires the proper timing, set up, and most important of all, the execution. Especially in a play like this believing in the scene a lot more will have a more hilarious impact, by placing myself in the shoes of my character and reacting to the chaos that ensues as I think he would, then it could develop some very funny moments.

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There is a timeless formula to writing a murder mystery that shows no sign of waning in popularity. This isn't to say that writing a murder mystery script, let alone a good one, is easy. Far from it.

Being able to draw the audience into the murder mystery and allowing them to feel immersed in the plot is tricky. And the genre is so familiar and popular there are many tropes to avoid. Yet there are also essential beats to hit. You can see what we mean by tricky.

The murder mystery reaches across more than TV shows and films, with novels and dinner party games being a big part of the sub-genre. It's almost beyond just a movie genre and instead, a cultural sub-genre in its own right.

The wealth of murder mysteries out there will mean that making your murder mystery script unique and able to stand out from a dense crowd will be difficult. Therefore, thinking outside the box in terms of your essential ideas going to be key. However, these essential ideas will resonate much louder when following some of the genre's key beats.

In this article, we take a look at what makes a great murder mystery script and how to approach writing one following the most important steps...

What is A Murder Mystery?

The murder mystery is a sub-genre of the crime genre that, of course, focuses and follows the homicide of a character (or characters). Involving crime, violence, investigative teams and heartbreak rippling across the victim's loved ones, the potential for drama is rich.

"You don't just spontaneously develop a fatal head wound."
Detective Vega, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

A murder mystery tends to be along the same lines as a psychological thriller but has its own rightful place in the genre world. There is and can be often a crossover in this respect.

It specifically focuses its plot around the homicide of a character and the piecing together of who was culpable. The murder tends to be at the beginning of the film and the audience is given clues of varying degrees before the grand reveal of who has done the murder at the end.

A murder mystery has always been popular in the context of novels. And this popularity has transferred onto the screen. Moreover, the genre is constantly shifting and updating, keeping itself relevant.

Examples of Modern Murder Mysteries

Murder mystery films and TV shows have appeared on screens pretty consistently over the years. The genre can be traced right back to the origins of cinema itself.

But the genre has managed to survive into the modern-day relatively seamlessly. And this is because such movies both play with the genre expectations and fulfil them, creating original and memorable works. Two great contemporary murder mysteries that take different forms and show the range of the genre include...

Knives Out (2019)

follows a detective investigator who is trying to get to the bottom of a suspected homicide that was made to look like a suicide. Taking an interesting angle on the murder mystery, Knives Out makes you chuckle, hold your breath as well as keeping you guessing as to the murder's culprit.

Knives Out has been said to be a modern stylisation of an Agatha Christie novel, as the film takes classic murder mystery techniques and refreshes them. The perfectly developed idiosyncratic characters ensure this peculiar murder mystery grabs your attention as the pressure starts to rise on the Thrombey family.

Zodiac (2007)

This highly rated murder mystery is based on the true serial killer famously named the Zodiac Killer. Starring Jack Gyllenhaal and Robert Downy Jr, keeps you on the edge of your seat for its long runtime.

Zodiac takes on the classic murder mystery formula to ensure the genre is preserved even for those who know the storyline. Taking full advantage of timing to ensure that the rise in tension is not too premature to become anticlimactic, the film hits murder mystery beats whilst employing a structure that has something unique to say.

The way in which the mystery peters out in its pacing reflects the real-life trajectory of the case. And in this, it not only keeps the audience guessing but reflects the real-world frustration of the unsolved case.

These two films are examples from the genre that do something interesting with it. And we'll continue to refer to them throughout the article. But let's now get down to what exactly makes up a successful murder mystery script...

The 10 Steps of Writing a Murder Mystery Script

1. What is Your Murder Mystery?

Deciding on what your murder mystery is will obviously be key to a successful script. And this should be the starting gun on your story. It needs to be believable, not too complex, and yet keep the audience guessing.

To do this, draft out some key moments in the mystery.

What makes the murder a mystery?

Who is going to be the suspect/s?

Will a murder actually happen and will we see it?

What does the murder look like?

All these questions will help you think through what your murder mystery actually is. From there you can start developing the structure and a proper storyline.

The nature of the murder is often what will make the story distinctive within the genre and marketplace. So don't botch this bit. Make your murder original and remarkable.

2. Setting Up Your Murder Mystery

This leads nicely on to setting up your murder mystery. After you have developed your idea for a murder to be solved you need to think about how you will set it up in the narrative.

How is it going to be introduced into the storyline?

Will your screenplay start with the murder?

Is the murder just implied, or will you see someone be mysteriously murdered?

Who will discover the body?

Setting up your murder mystery script should feel like a natural process, nothing too complex in the lead up to ensure everyone is on the same page whilst watching.

As this is the sub-genre of choice, the screenplay should be mainly focused around the murder. So setting it up will need to be a delicate procedure in terms of you tackling it.

3. The Characters In Your Murder Mystery Script

Curating the characters in your script is, of course, pivotal in the success of the screenplay. The characters can add another layer to the script, whether that's adding a comedic value through one or multiple personalities, or making the characters relatable.

Making sure these characters work together to tell the story you want, in the way you want, is crucial. These are the characters that will make your story convincing. Therefore, building their personalities, their relationships with one another and their connection to the audience becomes a turning point in the process of screenwriting.

Choosing who your protagonist will be is a big part of how you will convey your story and what you tell the audience. This will be the character that leads your narrative. So understanding the details of the character is essential to building a convincing murder mystery script.

Moreover, there are many different layers to the number of characters in the script.

Who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist?

Who are the supporting characters?

Does the detective work alone or not? Who is their accomplice?

Characters are obviously essential to every screenplay. But in a murder mystery script, the characters are especially important in creating what comes in between the main beats.

In addition, how the characters manifest can be essential to the direction of the story. Characters can, for example, throw the audience off before becoming the main culprit. Or a main culprit could be revealed to not be so.

4. Perspective

Having the murder mystery concept completed, along with the set-up and characters, means that the perspective in which the story is being told is next.

Will it focus on a protagonist's look at the narrative or a different character's perspective?

Typically the protagonist will be the detective leading the investigation. But by no means does this have to be the case. In Zodiac, for example, the protagonist is not strictly a detective but a newspaper cartoonist who becomes obsessed with the case.

However, either way, whoever the protagonist is they will have to be the most active participant in the solving of the case. And this is why the protagonist is typically a detective, as they are charged with solving the murder.

The way the story is being told will change the way you write the script, and change how you make it convincing. How you want your characters to resonate with the audience will also be key in this decision.

5. Setting Up The Narrative Arc

The narrative arc will make it clear where the storyline is going. Therefore, this will be the backbone of your murder mystery script. Of course, the exposition brings the background to why the audience is watching the TV show or film. This should provide some key details that will flow through the narrative.

Introducing the characters, the setting and the circumstances/time period will most likely kickstart the narrative arc. But after this, a rise in action will follow. This may be where the murder mystery starts to unfold.

The protagonist will set off down the path that the investigation will bring. In a genre that generally has a pretty clear direction, the direction of your particular narrative is important.

What will the tone be? How will the direction of your plot both fulfil and surprise genre expectations? What will the narrative arc be framed by?

This has to be more than just the attempted solving of the murder.

For example, in Knives Out, the narrative is based around the detective interviewing the various members of the family and piecing together what happened.

In Zodiac, the frequency of the murders escalates, consequently drawing more and more people into the mystery.

The narrative direction is essentially the how of what your story is. How does the unfolding of the mystery happen and where will it take the characters?

6. The Clues

In murder mysteries, clues are typically planted throughout the screenplay - either in the settings and props or the dialogue. The clues can keep the audience watching and wanting more, to figure out if they are right or wrong.

It is up to you as to how subtle or obvious you want to be with your clues. However, these clues should be in line with who the murderer actually is in the end.

Rising the tension within the narrative makes the screenplay more exciting and nail-biting. And the rise in tension should come parallel with the climax of your narrative arc.

This could be when the audience feels like they are getting closer to finding the murderer or an incorrect character has become a top suspect. It's all about feeling that there is progress.

Of course, red herrings can come by every now and then, but you need to remember when looking back: does it make sense that person is the murderer from the information you have given the audience? This is not to say it cannot be a shock when you reveal the murderer, but it should make sense.

Clues are like rewards for the audience. When the mystery is opaque, clues are pieces of the puzzle. And the satisfaction that can come from watching this can't be underestimated.

7. Rise The Tension

Typically a rise in tension will come with the protagonist getting closer to revealing the mystery at hand. And this might mean, for example, that the protagonist comes closer to the actual suspect. This is where all the previous build-up reaches its potential.

We've spent a while immersing in the details of the murder and the details of the potential suspect. Now it's time for the promise of that premise. And this is where the tension comes from - the balance between our investment in the story and the ambiguity as to what will happen next.

It's key that you raise the stakes in this sense. Otherwise, the feeling of progression will be lessened. In a way it has to feel like all the protagonist's work has been ill-conceived. They've done all this work to get close to the murderer and now they themselves (or perhaps their family or the victim's family) are in danger. It's no longer just about who the murderer is, it's about the protagonist 's safety.

We can see this brilliantly in Zodiac.

As Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) gets closer to the mystery, he starts receiving strange, threatening phone calls to his own home.

This threatens not just him but his loved ones.

And furthermore, the more he gets sucked into finding the murderer, the more his personal life suffers. This also raises the tension, as we wait to see if he will be able to hold everything together.

8. Timing Is Key

The timing of all the different elements and moving parts coming together is crucial in the execution of the murder mystery script.

If the timing is right, this will ensure these components all work together to create the story you want. When the timing is perfectly balanced, the twist and reveal will be unforeseen.

For example, the clues need to be included at the right time otherwise it will either be too obvious or not obvious at all. Make sure that the key reveals come when the tension is at its highest. And make sure this comes at a point for your protagonist where they will, in essence, be trapped.

This is the way to make the solving of the mystery feel high stakes. And this is especially the case for a mystery that has unfolded over a long period of time. If the case has unfolded over weeks, months or years, why should we feel the tension at a particular point?

This is where timing is crucial - the key movements towards the solving of the case have to come when it feels at the worst possible time for the protagonist. Or, in one way, the best possible time. The solving is necessary in this regard - it's now or never.

9. What Is Your Shocking Twist?

Having a shocking twist can be something that sticks with the audience after watching it. When a twist in a narrative occurs it can keep the audience hooked, keeping them on their toes. But making sure this twist isn't expected but is still a convincing part of the narrative arc, is essential.

A shocking twist needs to be handled with care but, also with creative flare. And this balance isn't always easy. But pulling it off looks like a twist that no one will see coming but that also makes total sense within the context of how the story has unfolded.

It can make the audience re-evaluate all that has come before and in this, it can provide the story with extra resonance. Furthermore, it's another way of raising the tension and stakes at this point in the narrative. Just when it looked like the case was coming together, something completely unexpected gets in the way. This will only intrigue the audience further, keeping them hooked for the final stretch.

10. The Ending

The ending is your moment to reveal who did it and why they did it. Ensuring you give the audience all the information they need to feel satisfied with the ending is key. The ending is the most important part of the murder mystery script, as it needs to be able to cater to expectations that have been set up in the narrative arc.

As mentioned above, when revealing the murderer it needs to make sense, otherwise, your audience will feel cheated of an ending. The climax to find out who did it is what a lot of people watch a murder mystery for. And so an unsatisfying reveal will leave the whole exercise feeling somewhat pointless.

As with all story endings, the ending to a murder mystery script is about tying everything together. And in this sense, the structure of the murder mystery ending is clear. Essentially, it's the answer to the pivotal question running through the entire screenplay - who did it?

However, quite often the most satisfying part of this final answer is the why rather than the who. It's the final part of the puzzle in this sense. The narrative arc might have been the how. Then the who and the why are offered up in quick succession in the finale.

The who is the answer we all crave. But the why is the justification that will stick in the mind. Why did this character commit the murder? Here is often where you can find the script's primary theme and the script's defining, lingering distinction.

In Conclusion

There is a whole lot of creative freedom when writing a convincing murder mystery script, though there are definitely some essential steps to take.

The murder mystery: Deciding on your murder mystery and ensuring you have plotted the narrative arc correctly will be the basis of your script being distinctive and successful.

The characters: Making sure you have a convincing set of characters with different personalities, relationships and goals will make your story all the more rich and entertaining.

The timing: Ensuring you have got all the elements of your narrative interwoven with one another and set up in the best way possible, means you should have the timing perfect. The timing of the shocking twist, rise in tension and the big reveal will be the key aspects of the story you need to time perfectly. Otherwise, the audience may not be quite so convinced by the conclusion and consequently, walk away disappointed.

The murder mystery can take many different routes. From a comedic murder mystery to a noir murder mystery, the genre is malleable and roomy.

As long as there is a what, who, how and why there will be an intriguing mystery. What fills the gaps in between these questions is what will make your murder mystery script and define whether it feels like a familiar but successful genre piece or something more distinctive, original and compelling.
-What did you think of this article? Share It, Like It, give it a rating, and let us know your thoughts in the comments box further down...
- Struggling with a script or book? Story analysis is what we do, all day, every day... check out our range of script coverage services for writers & filmmakers. This article was written by Georgie Watts and edited by IS staff.

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How to Write a Convincing Murder Mystery Script

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There is a timeless formula to writing a murder mystery that shows no sign of waning in popularity. This isn't to say that writing a murder mystery script, let alone a good one, is easy. Far from it. Being able to draw the audience into the murder mystery and allowing them to feel immersed in the plot is tricky.

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Similar to the guide on how to write a good comedy, I had no idea where to begin when it came to writing a murder mystery. Fortunately, I've managed to find this guide on writing a convincing murder mystery script which has provided thee fundamentals of what to include, this along with the short clip of TPTGW has helped me understand what to include in regards to an effective murder mystery. Since the first step is to write out the story behind this mystery, then create these characters within story, the connections they all have with one another, and finally to set up the motives and iron out the small details to keep the audience guessing. An example it gives is with the film Knives Out, a murder mystery story that introduces a wealthy family who attempts to find out how their father/grandfather had passed away, giving us a variety of character types and tropes that keep the story engaging yet keep the audience guessing on who did it and why. Though we only have 10 minutes for our piece, the information given by this website will assist in helping us layout the basics when beginning to write this murder mystery, and then seeing where we can add in some of the fumbles and mistakes along the way.

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This show known as 'The Goes Wrong Show', is based off of The Play That Goes Wrong, going so far as to include the original cast to continue as their characters of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society. This series is a prime example of how I vision our production turning out, the episodes of this show have given me inspiration and insight into how things could be set out for our production of TPTGW, and as such have helped me create my character Arthur Walts, the director of the Cwmni Theatre Blo drama group. A group similar to the one in the play, but having a twist on characteristics, personality, and of course motivation. By making our own cast of characters for this drama group, and casting them the roles in our Murder Mystery play.

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The Best of Chris (The Goes Wrong Show, Series 2)

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This compilation of the character Chris Bean in the show, The Goes Wrong Show, is what I'm using as inspiration for my character Arthur Walts, the director of Cwmni Theatr Blo. With the way Chris takes every performance he's in with such professionalism and commitment, no matter what goes wrong, is what I wish to include into my character Arthur, with my character being a bit older however I would possibly push some of the impatience he has at certain times with the cast, experimenting with those agitated emotions to see what comes about. Moments such as breaking character to correct an error, saying someone else's line when they forget, or even breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience MID PERFORMANCE, these are all aspects of Chris that I want to explore including his style of naturalistic yet serious style of acting. Because I believe that these examples will definitely help me understand who my character is on a more technical level.

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In "The Play That Goes Wrong," a meta comedy about a disastrous play within a play, the problems befalling a woebegone cast and crew begin before the show itself. At the Kravis Center, where the production runs through Sunday, actors work the aisles during the preshow, searching for a lost dog that will figure prominently in the second act. The fictional lighting and sound director (Trevor Watson) makes last-minute adjustments to the set, like installing missing floorboards.

We can tell something's amiss, because even the production's playbills have been wittily misprinted. But the first sign that something's really wrong is the onstage door that won't stay closed-a harbinger of the countless mishaps to come.

We're here to witness "The Murder at Haversham Manor," a creaky drawing-room whodunit in the mold of "The Mousetrap" or "An Inspector Calls"-the sort of stuffy, cliché-riddled mystery that opens with the discovery of a cadaver and concludes with the murderer's tidy revelation. Chris Bean (Chris Lancey) is both its "director" and star player, a tweedy detective named Carter who is summoned to discover which of a small clan of motive-rich aristocrats murdered the manor's namesake, Charles Haversham (Chris French), on the day of his engagement party.

Chris Beam's theatre company, though, is a ramshackle outfit, and the pleasures of "The Play That Goes Wrong" derive not from the mystery's resolution but from the domino effect of inside-theatre calamities that turn a run-through of a play into a veritable combat zone. Lighting cues are missed, so that when the curtain rises, we see the "dead" character crawling to his perch on the central fainting sofa. An actor's personal cell phone tumbles from the pocket of one character's coat. Actors constantly miss their marks and step on each other's lines and, owing to the soundman's incompetence and inattention, the audio is filled with missed cues and glitches.

Some props begin to fall off the walls of the set, seemingly of their own accord, while others were misplaced to begin with, like the "whiskey" that's really paint thinner, and which the actors are supposed to swig to calm their nerves. Instead, we get a number of boisterous spit-takes. And this is just Act One, the preamble to the manic, apocalyptic destruction of the second act.

"The Play That Goes Wrong" is not what you'd call sophisticated theatre. Heavy on physical comedy, it's anchored by jokes that were already losing their novelty on "The Three Stooges." There are only so many times we can watch a door slam on a character's face, or an actor simulate a "hysterical fit," or indulge in yet another flammable spit-take. There's also a tendency for the director-the real director, Matt DiCarlo-to let pregnant pauses play out for so long they nearly give birth, stretching the genuine witticisms to their actual breaking point, and we begin to look at our watches. I was surprised to see a substantial exodus of the Kravis Center's audience during intermission; clearly, this is not a show that will appeal to all tastes.

It's worth sticking it out, though, because the pacing lulls of Act One give way to the expertly staged, gonzo freneticism of the second act, a nearly nonstop ratcheting of technical snafus that leaves the stage, and the cast, a shambles. Nigel Hook's scenic design, which won the 2017 Tony Award, is an intricate marvel, a deceptively sturdy structure designed every day to be destroyed, complete with moving parts and trick magnets and other tools of a magician's trade. Wait until you see what happens to the manor's second-floor study.

The double-nay, triple-acting is terrifically on point, with each player conveying both their stylized, deliberately over-the-top murder-mystery archetype as well as the frazzled actor underneath it, who must constantly adjust to scenes gone awry. "The Play That Goes Wrong" is only able to sustain itself for two and a half hours because the actors playing the actors playing the characters struggle always to maintain the fiction despite the breakneck mishaps surrounding them at all times-to solve problems and improvise and cover for each other, as if by just McGuyvering this one problem, they'll be back on track again to solve the damn murder at Haversham Manor. I'm sure Agatha Christie would admire their dedication.
The Broadway tour of "The Play That Goes Wrong" runs through Sunday, Dec. 15 at the Kravis Center, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Tickets run $40-$85. Call 561/832-7469 or visit kravis.org.

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"The Play That Goes Wrong" Depicts a Producer's-and Actor's-Nightmare

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In "The Play That Goes Wrong," a meta comedy about a disastrous play within a play, the problems befalling a woebegone cast and crew begin before the show itself. At the Kravis Center, where the production runs through Sunday, actors work the aisles during the preshow, searching for a lost dog that will figure prominently in the second act.

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In regards to understanding what exactly our play is inspired by in regards to the stimulus, I decided to look at a synopsis of the latest performance of TPTGW. Here I'm able to analyse what made the show the comedy success that it is, along with seeing if there is anything I can take from this synopsis and sprout into ideas for our short version of this play. One thing in particular I'm looking for however is any mention of mistakes within the show, and it does indeed give me some inspiration, talking about being "heavy on physical comedy" which could lead to a very funny moment or two within our production, along with props being replaced or mixed up could also be interesting to look at once we have finalised our script. This source has definitely helped me understand TPTGW in a more technical way, especially when it comes to the timing and use of mistakes at certain points of the show.

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KBEV | The Play That Goes Wrong | BHHS Theatre Performance

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For the purpose of how I can play Arthur/The director of the theatre company, I went on YouTube and found an American Highschool version of TPTGW. This way I'll be able to observe and see what decisions the actor for Chris Bean made in regards to her performance, one moment that made me chuckle yet invested was when she was looking for a ledger, since they had not placed it on the set she stayed in character whilst looking and asking for it 'out of character' in order to carry on with the scene, in the end she did manage to find it after the actors backstage told her. This I found interesting because it is an example of what her character is, a professional controlled actor/director, who will carry on with the show no matter what happens, moving around the mistake and simply going with it as if it were part of the show. It's this type of acting I wish to include and portray in my character Arthur, since he is man quite similar to Chris Bean when it comes to his professionalism and determination in acting, never backing down and carrying on with the show, no matter how badly things go wrong.

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Getting to know the creators of The Play That Goes Wrong.

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To help with creating our script, I looked online to find the video of how the creators of TPTGW had managed to come together and create their show. Learning how they all met in LAMDA, shared and apartment together, and ended up creating the script for this show together, creating this show and the scenes through workshops related to their play, along with getting inspiration form the book 'The Art Of Coarse Acting' written by Michael Green, which is a humorous book about amateur theatre. With this and the rest of the information provided by the video, it's given me a basic idea of where to begin writing out the script, starting off with a basic premise and expanding where it goes, like with our idea of the murder mystery being based on the game Cluedo. Using that small premise to create a bigger storyline and create our characters for our actors to play as.

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Comedy - Satire, Romance, Humor: Comedy’s dualistic view of the individual as an incongruous mixture of bodily instinct and rational intellect is an essentially ironic view—implying the capacity to see things in a double aspect. The comic drama takes on the features of satire as it fixes on professions of virtue and the practices that contradict them. Satire assumes standards against which professions and practices are judged. To the extent that the professions prove hollow and the practices vicious, the ironic perception darkens and deepens. The element of the incongruous points in the direction of the grotesque, which implies an admixture of elements that do

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The 20th cent. has witnessed a number of distinct trends in comedy. These include the sophisticated and witty comedy of manners, initiated by Oscar Wilde in the late 19th cent. and carried on by Noel Coward, S. N. Behrman, Philip Barry and others; the romantic comic fantasy of such playwrights as James M. Barrie and Jean Giraudoux; and the native Irish comedy of J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Sean O'Casey, Brendan Behan, and Brian Friel.

Also important are the musical comedy, which descends from 18th-century ballad operas and the comic operas of W. S. Gilbert and A. S. Sullivan (see musicals) and the slick, satirical, and professional comedy of George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, and Neil Simon. Strongly contrasting with these sunny styles are the nihilistic, highly unconventional comedy, containing both comic and tragic elements, of dramatists of the theater of the absurd such as Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett and the so-called black comedy, often concerning topics like racism, sexual perversion, and murder, of playwrights such as Joe Orton, Harold Pinter, and David Mamet.

Sections in this article:

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2023, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

See more Encyclopedia articles on: Literature: General

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The 20th cent. has witnessed a number of distinct trends in comedy. These include the sophisticated and witty comedy of manners, initiated by Oscar Wilde in the late 19th cent. and carried on by Noel Coward, S. N. Behrman, Philip Barry and others; the

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These articles depict the evolution and various types of comedy throughout our history, giving insight into what comedy was from the Greeks, all the way to our modern day style of comedy. Performances such as festivals, melodramatic plays, the satire of New Comedy in 336 BCE, Shakespeare's comedies and many different variants of comedy throughout history. The articles also references to the origins, definitions, and theories on comedy, which after reading have helped me understand where it roots from, seeing how it originated from "phallic songs" and has now evolved to what it is today has opened my eyes to what can be considered good or bad comedy, the importance of either commitment to the joke/bit or the types of jokes and scenes to play out depending on what they are related to. A good example being some of the political jokes made mocking politicians and leaders who are deemed "corrupt" or "unfit to lead", as it is something that most people can agree on and poke fun at with each other, since comedy seems to be about the type of humour you decide to display it's important to test these scenes and ask yourself "Would I laugh at this?" and if not, then try something else. These articles have definitely helped in regards to understanding what comedy is, where it came from, the various types, and of course what would be best to display.

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melodrama Genre

Melodrama definition and meaning

Many conversations have been had about the differences between Melodrama and other popular genres such as, well, dramas. To really understand how it is distinguished, let's take a look at the Melodrama definition.

MELODRAMA DEFINITION

What is a melodrama?

Melodrama is a dramatic work in which events, plot, and characters are sensationalized to elicit strong emotional reactions from the audience. In literature, theatre, and cinema, Melodramas are focused on exaggerated plots rather than characterization. Melodrama characters are often given stereotypical roles. Conflicts are often sensationalized for exaggerated character emotions and performances.

The term "melodrama" originated from a combination of the Greek melos meaning "melody" or "song" and the French word drame meaning "drama." Melodramas were originally theatrical stage plays combining music and dialogue.

They were especially popular during the Victorian Era. Since then, Melodramas in television, film, and theatre have steered away from music and focused on sensationalized, highly emotional stories.

Characteristics of a Melodrama:

Stereotypical characters

Exaggerated conflicts

Sensationalized plots

Highly emotional

melodrama vs drama

What are the conventions of Melodrama

Fundamental genres all have subgenres that create their own niche. Within the genre of comedy there are romantic comedies, parodies, dark comedies, and more. In the same way, Melodrama is a sub-genre of drama.

Melodramas utilize similar story mechanisms as dramas such as conflict in a story, characters, themes and a logical plot. Where they differ is in the details of these mechanisms.

Drama vs Melodrama

1. Conflict

In a drama, the conflict a character faces is realistic. The conflict arises through a logical and reasonable series of events. In a Melodrama, conflicts are exaggerated and intensified to elicit stronger emotional responses from the audience. The conflict in these stories are often focused on character relationships rather than a larger force.

2. Characters

Many dramas are character-driven pieces. Characters are given realistic personalities and traits that reflect the diversity of the human population. Characters in dramas are often intricate and unique.

In Melodramas, characters are usually given stereotypical roles. These stereotypical roles have derived from the six stock characters. These six characters are referred to as the mean villain, the sensitive hero, the persecuted heroine, the clown, the faithful friend, and the villain's accomplice.

To learn more about the history of Melodrama in theatre and its evolution into the examples we see today, check out this video breakdown by Crash Course.

What is Melodrama

3. Themes

The differences in conflict and characters together also result in a difference in themes. Dramas explore larger concepts and themes that tend to focus on injustice, inequality, corruption, and societal norms.

While Melodrama used to explore these themes in its original plays, the stories we see in cinema and television today tend to have restrained themes. Themes in these stories are typically interpersonal and highly emotional such as love and family.

Modern Versions

Melodrama examples

Melodrama's theatrical origin inevitably bled into all forms of storytelling. Melodramatic work can be found in literature, film, and television. The latter debatably has been influenced the most by this style of storytelling.

Television has taken a unique liking to the sensationalized plot lines and emotional twist and turns. Television shows like This is Us, Grey's Anatomy, and Chicago PD all fall under this category.

What makes these shows so popular are the uncommon, emotionally provocative moments. Just take a look at this compilation of fan voted best moments from Chicago PD. The scenes are ultimately engaging, but uncommon nonetheless.

Melodrama examples * Chicago PD

A common mistake people make when categorizing these stories is mistaking emotional stories for Melodrama. Melodramas are emotional, but not all emotional movies are Melodramas.

For example, The Pursuit of Happyness is often described as a Melodrama. The film is undoubtedly emotional but it doesn't qualify because the story of the film is based on a true story and unfolds with a realistic plot with realistic characters. This is the true story of the protagonist of The Pursuit of Happyness Chris Gardner.

From Homelessness to Happiness

Melodrama has evolved since its origin into something new while retaining its core characteristics. It was wildly popular during the Victorian Era for the same reason it is wildly popular on television today. These exaggerated stories appeal to the emotions audiences turn to the story to feel. And it does it in the most direct way possible.

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Ultimate Guide to Movie Genres

Melodrama is only a drop in a bucket of subgenres that exist in theatre and cinema. To learn more about the various genres and subgenres that exist, check out our next article. We take a look at general genres and the more niche subgenres that fall under them. Learn more next.

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Melodrama Explained - Characters, Plots & Emotions

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Many conversations have been had about the differences between Melodrama and other popular genres such as, well, dramas. To really understand how it is distinguished, let's take a look at the Melodrama definition. Melodrama is a dramatic work in which events, plot, and characters are sensationalized to elicit strong emotional reactions from the audience.

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The great works of Shakespeare from "Julius Caesar" to "Antony and Cleopatra" (with the obvious exception of "Twelfth Night") have been largely understood as tragedies, either of what Auden would call the Christian variety, in which case we understand the central characters as suffering from a fatal flaw which dooms those around them as well as themselves, or as tragedies of the Classic variety, in which case we understand the central characters as caught up in existential situations beyond their control, those including the warp and woof of nature, social relations, and the emotions of jealousy and ambition to which all people are subject, not just the tainted few. That construction of the plays is certainly true enough and, following Aristotle, in both cases people are shown as pushed beyond endurance so that they emerge scourged of pity and terror, justly having become aware of their own human, social and metaphysical limitations, the audience morally improved for having observed and grasped and engaged in these lives.

There is another way to look at this set of great works. Rather than looking at the plays as tragedies, these plays can be considered melodramas. That term need not be treated as a designation of something less than a tragedy, a tragedy manqué, in which the playwright has either not fully developed the tragic nature of his characters or where the playwright settled for placing characters in social situations where they go on too long about what are, after all, the relatively trivial travails of life, and generally exhibit their less than noble characters. The distinction between melodrama and tragedy is not so easily drawn. Lear goes on rather long windedly and his problems are indeed the social problems that are created by an old man coming to live with his relatives. Why does he have to keep all those knights with him in his daughter's castle? He just has the pathetic conceptions of past grandeur that may descend on any old person. That is no reason to go off to the heath and bemoan his fate. Get a grip on yourself and get thee off to a nursing home.

The argument can also be reversed. A dramatic work that is clearly a melodrama because it has overdrawn emotions, overextended suspense and people notable for their weaknesses rather than their strengths, can bear the weight of a more tragic interpretation. Becoming attracted to the wrong person who gets you involved in a murder, as that happens in Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity", would seem pure melodrama. And yet Fred MacMurray's Walter Neff is doomed by his cynicism as much as by Barbara Stanwyck's allure, his descent into murder worthy of consideration as tragedy. He was not cynical enough, and that is a trait that is all too human, all too general, and applicable in all times and places. His cynicism narrowed him as a human being even as it narrowed his ability to notice his own vulnerability. And Walter Neff did have strengths that could have been put to greater advantage. He was glib, intelligent, and resourceful. Edward G. Robinson, playing Neff's boss, is correct to consider Neff's downfall a cause of sorrow rather than of rejoicing. Fortinbras also takes the role of someone who sums up the fall of someone who had the capacity for greatness but muffed it. So the inferiority of melodrama to tragedy may simply be only that it is not superlative drama, inferior to tragedy only in that its heroes are lesser people than Shakespeare's kings, and that the dramatic execution is not as grand as it is in Shakespeare, rather than in the fact that melodrama operates on lesser principles.

Try a different tack. Melodrama exists simultaneously with tragedy. When a play is looked at as a tragedy, it is considered for the ways it goes beyond pity and terror; when it is looked at as a melodrama, it is considered for the ways it does not go beyond pity and terror, but rather wallows in them, the audience asked to consider how much of these baleful emotions it can endure without withdrawing engagement from the play, finding a way to distance oneself from the play by noting, for example, that MacMurray should have sized up Stanwyck right away as a woman to run away from, or that the plan to murder her husband had too much room for things to go wrong, something Wilder passed over because he wanted to get to his point that the lovers would turn on one another. Looking at Shakespeare's greatest dramas is therefore a kind of test in which the audience finds out how much it can endure, just as teenagers test themselves when they go to horror movies, something Shakespeare had tried out as early as "Titus Andronicus", and yet, by the time of the great dramas, the emotions are so rich, so compelling, that in enduring these emotions the audience learns so much more about what those emotions are, jealousy and ambition and the rest, previously understood only in much more petty ways, and in that too there is a moral lesson.

Deeply engaging in dreary and dreadful emotions rather than somehow overcoming them explains why an audience of "earthlings" would be able to engage high tragedy: they would need only dip into or consider while their major investment and attention is on the pathos of people defeated because what they want is so wrong or outrageous and because they have so twisted themselves to get it as well as because of how often their defeats are repeated, as if the protagonists of these dramas were so many cases of obsessive compulsive behavior, continuing to knock their heads against the wall not so as to split them, as in Marlowe's "Tamburlaine", but because doing so is how they understand their lives and how one or another part of the audience understands one or another part of its own.

Understanding Shakespeare's greatest dramas as melodramas sheds light on how melodramatic dramaturgy sometimes, in these works, takes precedence over a strict adherence to a formula for tragedy. Looking at "Hamlet", for example, as melodrama, helps, at the least, untangle some of the play's narrative problems. These are not the ones summed up in T. S. Eliot's phrase "the objective correlative", which is a reference to the fact that there are not enough events to backup or supply substance for Hamlet's practice of tacking back and forth in his behavior. There are plenty of psychological behavioral correlates to explain both Hamlet and the people who surround him. Hamlet has to mind his manners because he does not know who his enemies are and how many of them reside in his soul and how many reside outside him in other people. Polonius juggles platitudes so as to juggle his relation to the newly seated king as a prime advisor with his concern about his daughter carrying on with the son of the king who had recently died. Does the change of kings make the situation more or less fraught? No wonder he sends his son out of the country, lest Laertes be killed on some pretext or just because he becomes caught up in the general breakdown in which the country is engaged-which is, of course, what happens.

Rather, the problem with "Hamlet'' is that we look for central dramatic moments that set the action underway and where crucial choices are made, and come to recognize that any of a number of moments will qualify, and so none satisfy. Hamlet thinks the Ghost set him on his way, though we know beforehand that he thinks politics and culture in Denmark are rank and that he has motive to feel in competition with Claudius, his motives known to him and given to us indirectly through his inappropriately passionate talk about both his mother and his girlfriend and his anger against Polonius and some of his old friends, Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern, who had not committed such a great crime when they kept Claudius informed about what Hamlet's prickly and tempestuous personality was up to; it is what good friends would do for a friend who had gotten into deep waters. Hamlet grasps onto the Ghost as an excuse for his indignation, as he will move on to other excuses, such as when he withdraws from killing Claudius while the king is at prayer, presumably out of respect for a church whose doctrines he does not describe though which he does echo, in his secular way. Hamlet has a Christian sense of guilt and sinfulness and what can only be called anticipatory remorse.

As a tragedy, or even as a revenge tragedy gone wrong in that Hamlet betrays what a protagonist is supposed to do in a revenge play, there is the set up, where Hamlet is shown to be caught up in a usurpation of power, nudged along in his awareness by the Ghost of his father, and then there is the body of the play, where Hamlet plans various stratagems, such as confronting his mother, or thinking about killing the King, and then planning the play within a play as his final proof of the King's guilt, all of these going wrong, and then Hamlet is distracted by Ophelia's death, after his own disappearance from the scene, the plot unraveling, looking for a way to end, and, finally, beaten to whatever renewed attack on the King he might contemplate by the King's own plot to finally get him out of the way by having him killed in what is ostensibly a friendly duel, however deep are the passions that underlie that duel. So even though there is much meandering, the message of the tragedy of Hamlet is that passions run deep and burst through, as they did with his mother and against Polonius, and it doesn't much matter how the fickle finger of fate finally decides to resolve a conflict that has gone on too long. It is a tragedy because the warring facets of Hamlet's character, those that mirror the possibilities of the modern individual, full of moral fury and dangerous inwardness, struggle against one another as well as the circumstances of his place in his family and at court that bind him.

The melodramatic trajectory of the play is different. Hamlet is put to brood, for reasons that are unclear, by his father's death and the succession of his uncle to the throne, the audience led to suspect some kind of adolescent breakdown caused by an over concern with his mother's sex life and his own ambivalence towards women as that is seen in his relation with Ophelia, a woman who he disdains for having granted him her favors. Yes, he might rankle over a wedding so soon after a funeral, but given the ways of politics, that successions need to be clearly established, it is no reason to take deep affront. Instead, Hamlet rants and whines and nevertheless finds excuses for not killing the king because to do so would be to finally have to face the grown up consequences of the malarkey he has been mouthing. All he can do is act the impresario and imagine that the play within the play settles anything other than providing another opportunity to express his over the top emotions. This flawed rather than tragic protagonist settles down, leaves the country, returns, offers soliloquies about death, as would be expected from someone too long an adolescent, and then is killed in a duel that is something of an afterthought in that it is not an outcome of the rest of the plot but an event that may be, if anything, a way to reintroduce him to the court whose legitimacy he now accepts.

Hamlet also betrays a need for the play within the play to prove what he supposedly already knew, which is to make the same mistake Michael Corleone made when, early in his career as Don, he insisted on a confession before killing someone who betrayed him. He did not trust his judgment as of yet. Hamlet also insists on insulting Ophelia for her sexuality, which is not a nice way to treat a girl who had bestowed her favors, after all, on him. Hamlet is always flailing about, displaying a jejeune sense of the world that seems so right only from the inside, and that, we realize upon contemplation, he also senses to be the case, as does everyone around him, who give him a wide berth, and with good reason. Hamlet had not offered an excuse for nor needed more information before killing Polonius, nor is he punished for that event. He is a madman who moves from one debacle to another. It must have been a difficult moment, seeing what he could do when he let himself get out of hand, and he was not going to repeat it, playing it safe, reading the situation as safe, even when he is challenged to a duel by someone whose father he had killed, as if the rules of chivalry would protect him.

Hamlet is maddeningly difficult a personality, wallowing in his self pity, moving from one maladroit moment to the next, spurred on by his self-loathing as well as by an education which should have made him aware that politics goes on as usual despite personal grief and personal issues. How long do we have to put up, make amends for, and repair the damage done by this suddenly ungainly late adolescent? It is all an embarrassment that calls for much too much forbearance. Why put up with the psycho? How much of this is the audience able or willing to endure in this very long play?

It is Claudius, at the end, then, who has overdone things. There is, by the end, no longer any reason to kill Hamlet except in that it reveals the malevolence that Hamlet had expected all along. Getting his Queen killed in the process is just another pathetic and laughable element of an overly convoluted plot against Hamlet that is so sadly conceived and badly executed that it succeeds only in removing the entire court from the scene-and for what? Nothing accomplished except the expression of over the top sentiments, all engendered by Hamlet's own original over the top distaste for the succession of Claudius to the kingship. Melodramas can take any number of twists and turns, as we know from watching soap operas, but tragedies have to remain true to their arc, as Racine knew, who therefore succeeded in writing extremely boring and unenlightened plays because he imagined the tragic arc, the moral it would tell, before rethinking the intricacy of the story for its own sake.

If that is the case, that "Hamlet" is merely a melodrama, why does it, even in those terms, have such a hold on the western imagination? Erasmus had, nearly a century before, discussed the nature of the modern kingship. A king was no longer to be primarily a warrior. Rather, he was to be primarily a statesman. That meant he had mastered statecraft well enough to keep out of unnecessary wars, and was also, to use the modern terminology, the chief policy maker for the nation in economic and social matters. That new idea was well represented by Elizabeth I, who presided over the elaboration of an English royal bureaucracy that, in her reign, was becoming broad ranging enough to be considered a modern government. Which is not to speak of her constructing a new religion, rather than, as her father had done, merely creating one, nor is it to speak of her having decided how to deal with Spain, first by tempting it, then by harassing it, and then, when there was no alternative, defending England against it. Hamlet, on the other hand, deals with Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern as a Machiavellian would rather than as a statesman would. Nor does Hamlet consult with Claudius about how to move the state forward through making a show of unity, however falsely felt. Rather, he is an inveterate schemer and betrayer, and so a bit of a throwback to what a king or a prince was in pre-modern times, even if he had been trained at Wittenberg and so could have been expected to know better.

Hamlet had turned his sophisticated education in a different direction when he brought it with him to a backward kingdom. What he had brought with him was the modern perception of the self as a place of secrets kept from oneself as well as others, and a brooding presence most concerned with keeping his motives and his psychological evolution to himself. The motivation for this royal fellow is his internality rather than his service to the state. Harold Bloom is correct in seeing Shakespeare as a transition into the modern world where that new entity, the individual, is at war with his society. Hamlet dies because the stage is not yet set for such a king or such a man and that is sad, a man caught out of his time that would be acceptable in a more modern time, in Elizabethan times, but not in the olden days not otherwise specified. Our condescension is also part of melodrama. This did not have to be. It worked out badly but was not a necessary dénouement. It was cultural rather than existential. Stay away from the Denmark of an earlier time.

William Hazlitt was wrong to think that tragedy is concerned with existential matters while comedies are concerned with social matters. Both do both. Think of "Twelfth Night". Melodrama, it has been suggested in the case of "Hamlet", also deals with matters that are at the same time existential and social matters. There is the play of the intellectual against the courtier: Hamlet's heightened consciousness set against the political state of mind rife in any court. There is also the play on a person set into a time and place from which he has become too far removed, as if he were in a tale of time travel and knows he does wrong to try to interfere in the ways of the more primitive race. These two plot motifs are woven out of confrontations that are existential in nature, in that they require the protagonist to violate the natural metaphysical order, as in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", so as to illuminate what is so moving and comical and strange about the disparities that exist in custom and in understanding between a consciousness and its surroundings and between one time and another time.

Another reason to think that melodrama is not so different from tragedy is that melodrama can be read as having meanings, both existential and social, rather than just as an entertainment which provides us with the occasion to have aroused in us both fearful and piteous emotions for the pleasure of us experiencing them, knowing full well we have been provoked into these feelings by the playwright's ingenuity, which we can admire as our adrenalin levels go up and our sympathies are engaged, fully aware that it is a passing thing, not real, and so putting off rather than only anticipating the time when we too will be in a battle or in a cancer ward. "Double Indemnity" entertains us with a plan we do not have and the satisfaction that comes from that poor sucker getting his just reward; Walter Neff is therefore a case of schadenfreude.

But Walter Neff is also engaged in a battle with existential forces of which, as an insurance agent, he is well aware. The whole point of the examination of fraudulent claims is, as it were, to defend the laws of probability, as those are laid out in actuarial tables. Fraud is an attempt to avoid what those laws would dictate, those laws making possible not only insurance but the regularity of any number of aspects of life. Edward G. Robinson is more than Fortinbras; he is God overseeing his world, creating justice if for no other reason than to see to it that his laws of the existential universe remain in force. To Billy Wilder, who had personally earned this understanding, the two meanings of law-the laws of nature and the laws of man-are the same in that the laws of nature need enforcement against the madmen who would defy and defame them. The Nazis would overturn the objective, however complicated, relation of nature to nurture in their adherence to their doctrine of racial differences. Neff, for his part, is a defrocked angel much more than Satan is in Milton because his evil is so narrow, even as what he threatens is so large, which is that lust is indeed a major one of Satan's tools.

If either the characters in a play or else the standard dramatic plot devices used in both tragedy and melodrama, such as recognition scenes or courtly audiences or romantic dalliances, can be read in either a tragic or melodramatic fashion, then what in the play gives warrant to reading it as one or the other? The key decision on the part of the audience lies in their reading of the plot. If a plot is read as having a crucial event happen at the beginning of the play, with the rest of the play an unfolding of what has been set early on, then the play is being read as a melodrama; if a plot is read as having a crucial event happen in the middle or towards the end of the play, even if earlier events had foreshadowed the crucial event, then the play is being read as a tragedy.

This proposition is contrary to the notion that tragedy is inevitable while melodrama is happenstance, the unexpected turns of a plot providing an audience with its pleasure. According to the mistaken view, a tragedy is there from the beginning of the play, waiting only to be unraveled. The drama is varied and made suspenseful by the art of dramatic construction. The crucial event in "Oedipus Rex" appears to be Oedipus becoming aware of what he had done, though that is because it is related as a mystery story, the king trying to get to the bottom of what happened. In fact, his fate was sealed at the beginning of his story when he, the stuff of kings, is brought to a peasant house to be raised. The same happens for the purposes of epic exultation rather than tragedy, to Moses, who is raised as an Egyptian prince but is destined by the plot of "Exodus" to have to come to terms with the fact that he had been born an Israelite, his masterful manner joined with his great cause, and so set from the beginning on a course to free his people. Melodrama, in that understanding, unites the critical event with the climax. "The Gunfight at the OK Corral" presents the last moments of the Western as when the important things happen, the rest preparation for the final confrontation, though that may be a convention of the Western rather than of the nature of melodrama.

That view of melodrama, however, mistakes the relation of critical early points to critical later points. Yes, Joseph Cotton finally meets Orson Welles at the Vienna Ferris wheel and all becomes clear not only in the plot but also in the mind of the finally disabused naïve American. The chase around the bar is exciting but a coda, a fifth act used to show how justice is finally done, as if that could undo what has come before. But "The Third Man" is more rightly read as tragic because it provides no way out from its early scenes that unfurl the duplicity and distrust at the heart of post war Vienna (a setting for corruption for Graham Greene as it was for Shakespeare). If Harry Lime did not exist, he would have to be inferred. For all his tragic sense of life, Hardy is correctly read as melodramatic rather than tragic because everything, you know from the beginning, is going to go downhill, the events that set that into place happening at the beginning. And for all his talk of an American tragedy, Dreiser is melodramatic because he sees social situations set in childhood as explaining what needs to be explained about what the characters will eventually do. He is a social commentator rather than a tragedian.

This point that a melodrama is there from the beginning while a tragedy requires one or more critical events to take place towards the end is easily made with "Macbeth". The prediction of the witches can be taken to mean that Macbeth is destined to go from bad to worse however much he struggles with the trajectory he sees his life is taking. That takes the drama off in the direction of melodrama. Another case. The predictions can also be treated as mere omens without any control over the future. They can be altered through actions taken in the awareness of what the trajectory might well be. In that case, the climatic event is when Macbeth says that he will go on in blood. He has not so much accepted his fate as become identified with it, made himself over to be that way, where previously, with the death of others, he can be said to have been the inheritor of events, and that even with the death of Banquo, he feels guilt, as a human would, for bad things he has done that nonetheless profited him. In that tragic reading, the decisive moment doesn't take place until Act III. It is a redefinition of personality rather than a particular event that turns the play onto its now inevitably downward course.

The same principle of reading a play as either a melodrama or a tragedy depending upon when the crucial event in the play takes place holds for "Antony and Cleopatra". Reading the play as a melodrama is to give great weight to the opening speech where Philo announces the "dotage" into which Antony has fallen. So rather than the play building up to the notion that Antony has imperiled his reputation and his soul through his love for this queen, the play begins with it and so is allowed to take a different direction, one which simply spells out the extent of his humiliation and the diminishment of his soul. Since the claim is so broad, the viewer is likely to doubt the teller, and the suspense is sustained until Antony himself, a scene later, admits, in a soliloquy, that he is enthralled and has to pull himself together. As a melodrama, we see him strain against the bonds of his passion and come to understand the nature of that passion for a woman who admits readily enough, to both herself and to her servants, that she is manipulating Antony. She too, of course, may well be in the thralls of love, and so only thinks that she is in control of her manipulative wiles, excusing what she does for passion as something done for self interest. That may be, the audience will suspect, the way it is with all loves, and not just great ones: people think they are in control when they are not, and yet, whether in control or not, they use the resources of the self that they have been granted to either effect, so much so that neither they nor their beloved nor the audience can tell what is love and what is not other than in the declaration of it.

That scene is enough to indicate that the play can be read either tragically or melodramatically: do we attend to the nature of this love or to the depths of this humiliation, one and the other the same. Further scenes also allow reading the play as one or the other. When Antony informs Cleopatra that his wife Flavia is dead, just after hearing the news of her death causes him to remember her with respect, Cleopatra does not respond as a woman sympathetic to her lover would. Rather, she castigates Antony for having more of an interest in the dead than in the living, more concerned with his past life than his present one. This can be interpreted as the outrageous jealousy of an Egyptian who can make no compromise in her demands on her beloved, devoid as it is of a Roman's sense of honor. That Anthony is not made angry by it, or bides his anger, suggests that he has already given in to the Egyptian point of view; he is so smitten that he has no resources to defend anything he once held dear. Read tragically, that means he steps more deeply into his servitude to Cleopatra every day, acting in a way he would have thought not long before to be shameful.

It is easier, however, to read that scene melodramatically. Its outcome had been telegraphed in the prior scene where Cleopatra said she would keep Anthony close to her by taunting him rather than by showering him with endearments. So Cleopatra is like a soap opera heroine in that you always know what she is up to and you know she is a sinister figure rather than a puzzling or singular one. Melodrama divides people into being, on the whole, good or bad, with a few nuances thrown in just to keep things interesting. Cleopatra is clearly manipulative rather than sincere. The audience is never allowed to think her love for Anthony should be taken on its face-other than in the sense that the way she loves is the way she loves: sly, grasping, selfish, so un-Roman. The surprise in the melodramatic reading-for melodrama does allow surprise, even if the choices characters make are preordained-is how schooled Antony is in how to deal with Cleopatra, how to calm her down, how to ride out her anger and her anguish. He is like a member of an old married couple which has found out how to accommodate one another's ways. And yet they had not been lovers that long. There is an edge in lovers acting this way. There is no indication that he is resisting her, only that he is putting up with her, not to win her, for that is done, but so as to get on with the next moment. Antony has tamed his shrew and so been tamed by her. The scene has more yelling in it, perhaps, than would occur with lovers who had long been related to one another, and it is some satisfaction to an audience to hear their exchanges, far more aria-like than most lovers can manage. And yet we are left uninformed as to whether this is just the way it is or whether it is a shock to Antony's system to learn from the scene how far he has come from being a Roman.

And so it goes in the scenes after that, Antony always showing enough of a sense of where his emotions should be at that the audience can at least hope that he come to himself, see the situation as it is, make some dramatic or tragic gesture that will not, perhaps, earn him back his fortune but at least earn him back some of his honor. Then, in what seems to me the central scene of the play, he gives in to Cleopatra's military advice, which is to go for a battle at sea, using her ships, rather than to use his army in a land battle. Coming under Cleopatra's sway in matters of love or even court intrigue is one thing; to surrender his judgment about military matters is quite another. It is to jump fully into his un-Roman character. It is a considered judgment, his last chance at freedom, and after that, what clings to him are the vestiges of Roman character, as when he tells his attendants to take his treasure ship, rather than that his Roman spirit is any longer the chief guide of his character. The final descent is fully pathetic, a man aware of his undoing and how he has contributed to it, even if, with some effort, this can be seen as a descent noble in its self-consciousness, and therefore tragic. Either way, the scenes are each capable of an orotund, and so melodramatic, reading, or of a subdued, and therefore tragic, reading.

The proof of the pudding is in the testing, which means that the proposition that tragedies can be read as melodramas, depending on where the critical moment of the play takes place, can be applied in reverse form: melodramas can also be read as tragedies if the critical moment is pushed downfield. Readers and audiences regularly "overrate" a melodrama and make it about grander issues than are actually at stake. "Double Indemnity" is taken to be about the nature of greed and lust when it is mostly about the scheming of two particularly limited people who want to take advantage of a loophole in the system and then get found out by an insurance investigator. As Billy Wilder knew, because of his striking images of the insurance office, the movie is about deploying the eternals of greed and lust within the confines of the idea of insurance, and that the two sets of emotions do not go easily together. If you look at the movie through the lens of the early scenes in the insurance office, then catching the murder is inevitable, because you know Edward G. Robinson is being regarded too lightly. If you look at the movie through the growing attachment, in spite of himself, of Fred MacMurray to Barbara Stanwyck, then you see him being drawn away from a reasonable assessment of what the probabilities of life will allow. Neff becomes Antony.

The same is true of those Shakespeare plays that are primarily understood as melodramas, even though they are routinely called problem plays because they have tragic themes and yet people seem to come out all right in the end. "Measure for Measure", for the most part, is melodramatic. A magistrate who is tyrannical and puritanical tries to coerce a woman to trade her virtue for the life of her brother, who has been condemned to death. She is saved, in the nick of time, by the return of the absent king. This is "Tosca", except for the fact that Tosca got everybody into trouble and saved nobody. And so "Tosca" is tragic only by the rule that all of the major characters in the opera are dead by the time it ends and by writing off Tosca's behavior as either crazy or in the service of Victorian prudery. "Tosca" is a melodrama in that it is deep in sadness and deformed personalities and no one ever rises beyond the sorrows inflicted on them by an authoritarian state.

"Measure for Measure" can be read the same way, except that the audience is misdirected to read it as a comedy because everybody pairs off at the end just as they do in Shakespearean comedy. The rub, of course, is that most of them don't want the partners they get, the assignments the result of the moral appropriateness of the pairings rather than that joy will result in all of these unions. People get who they deserve, which is a reprise of the Dante view, referred to earlier in the play by the Duke, that people do get their just desserts. The play, moreover, is full of what are conventional melodramatic devices. There is the stretching out of suspense, Claudio announced as dead, a rather cruel act by the Duke, just so that he can be woven into the revelation scene at the end of the play that is used to restore "justice" to the world. The play even teases the audience by finding Barnardine to serve as a substitute for Claudio and then having to move on to some other plot contrivance when Barnardine is used instead for comic purposes. The whole of the plot would seem to stretch out the issue of Isabella's virtue much too long, she protesting too much, rather like Judith in the Bible going on about not having sacrificed her virtue so that she could get in to kill the enemy general. And the Duke is too long winded in his sometimes opaque and casuistic explanations of how morality works. These are only mildly amusing when the audience remembers that people's lives are at stake. Indeed, critics generally agree that there is not much to be said for any of the characters in the play. There is hardly a noble property in any of them, only "the seeming" of nobility, especially in the Duke, who seems to be toying with his creatures.

The key to this melodramatic reading of "Measure for Measure" is at the beginning of the play. The king has appointed the magistrate to be in charge so that he can test him, which is what happens in "Job" if you read the beginning dialogue between God and Satan as integral. Yes, the passage may have been added centuries later to make the work more palatable to a more sentimental and conventionally pious audience. Hellenistic philosophy is in that way reduced to emotions appropriate at the time of the "Apocrypha". If "Measure for Measure" is read that way, then Angelo, invested with the powers of the Duke, not knowing that the Duke will remain around to arrange things to work out the way he wants them to, is corrupted by his powers until he takes a final leap into evil by trying to have his way with Isabella. That power corrupts is an old theme, as old as Herodotus, and one that is not restricted to tragedy.

Now, reread (or replay) "Measure for Measure" as a tragedy. The Duke is a somewhat fumbling God in that he always has to improvise to move his creatures around to do what he wishes them to do. They resist doing what their noble sides would seem to call for. Isabella will not save her brother; Angelo will not remain honorable. The crucial point can be set at the moment of the bedroom trick, where every one who participates has defamed themselves in that Angelo has extorted sex; Mariana has whored herself to her own husband (a trick reworked by Arnold Schwarzenegger in "True Lies"); and Isabella has served as her procuress, with the assistance of the Duke disguised as a monk. The deceit that is supposed to keep everybody pure makes all those complicit in it dirty. They have gotten themselves into a Christian tragedy, never mind that the God figure who presides over the mischief seems, at that point, only to be getting his way as the behind the scene master of his universe.

The crucial point can be placed even later, in the resolution scene. An old production of "Measure for Measure" that was done by Theatre for a New Audience nicely balanced the melodramatic reading of the play, as that concerns a municipality out to close its bawdy houses without acknowledging the bad effects of such a decree, much less the defects of authoritarian rule, with the tragic reading of the play, which is that having God appear in the world is not necessarily a good thing because his intentions are not human nor humane. But people choose to do what God wants because they do see some justice in what he requests, while they always have the option of refusing to do what He wants. Angelo is ordered to reunite with Mariana, and agrees to do so; Lucio agrees to marry the bawd who had borne his child, even though it seems more punishment than benefit. And Isabella is silent before the Duke's request to marry him, even though she had wanted to become a nun and so be married to God. She may be having second thoughts about that ambition. Indeed, Arin Arbus, the director of that production, went so far as to have the actor playing the Duke sigh in relief when everyone accepts his arrangements. They have done this of their own free will and have, finally, justified God's plan to test his people, though it might have gone the other way. People make the best of the bad deals they have been dealt, and in that is, sort of, a kind of salvation.

There are large implications in understanding how Shakespearean melodrama and Shakespearean tragedy are opposite sides of the same coin. One has to do with the significance of that other Aristotelian characteristic of drama: the setting. The usual view is that the settings of the great tragedies are of no account. Shakespeare has simply chosen the names of far off places so as to give the plays an air of mystery. Denmark might as well have been named Illyria. That however is not the case. William Hazlitt argued that Shakespeare's comedies were different from Shakespeare's tragedies in that the comedies concerned the peculiarities of social structure, humor found in the less than seamless web of social life, so that Malvolio can think himself more worthy than his person or his station deserves. It is funny for him to think so much of himself because he is so obviously of a lower social class and everybody knows that, and so this is an object of humor rather than of anger or tragedy, as is the case in "Richard III", where the protagonist is able to enforce his ambitious and ignoble motives. What Hazlitt said about comedy can be modified so that it applies to melodrama, which exploits the peculiarities of the particular social structure of a society, people caught up in the preoccupations of that culture, and the cultural blindness inherent in any culture, rather than in the basic furniture of the human condition which is the topic of tragedy, though it is also the topic of grand comedy, such as "Twelfth Night", which is after all, about gender confusion, loss and redemption and any number of other themes that apply in all of human life.

If we read "Hamlet" as a melodrama, then it is important to understand the particular social setting, even if the play is often situated by whoever puts on a production in some nineteenth century never-never land so that actors can wear greatcoats and actresses can wear long gowns rather than having them dress up in those Elizabethan costumes that seem so ridiculous. Denmark is not far from Northern Germany and the reformation. Hamlet went to Wittenberg and is returning to the borders of civilized Europe and its pagan ways, complete with ghosts and the election of kings who legitimize themselves by marrying the widow of the prior king. Only Hamlet notices that as inappropriate. Kenneth Branaugh was right to think of Fortinbras' army slogging through snow to reach a remote Elsinore.

Lear's kingdom, for its part, is on the brink of becoming a civil society. The idea of the crown is only narrowly distinct from its being a family possession, the various branches of the family each loyal to only themselves rather than to some national structure. Lear was trying to divide up his kingdom in the way Charlemagne did, so that three nations would be established, so that the kingdom would not regress into a set of tribes. The same thing happened in the Old Testament. Patriarchal families negotiate with one another; Moses establishes a single people who are not too happy about the idea that there will be a single law giver. Shakespeare treats Denmark in the same way. It is desperately caught up in a succession crisis and can find no resolution but a relative who seems a usurper because his claim is based on having married the wife of the late king. Hamlet is caught between family matters and matters of state. Is his distrust of the old pattern of usurpation based on an allegiance to a new notion of sovereignty or rather a throwback to when communal politics were about family politics, his allegiance to a dead father trumping his allegiance to the state? In general, Shakespeare is in many plays concerned with that moment when a new kind of social contract is established, the one that goes beyond clan. Macbeth the play challenges the idea that Macbeth the murderer is assuming power in a way very much out of the ordinary. A new Scotland will be established from abroad. And so the substance of the plays cannot be separated from their setting.

And, of course, "Antony and Cleopatra" has long been noted for establishing an Egyptian state of mind to contrast with the Roman state of mind. It is not hard for an Egyptian to think of a woman as winding herself around a man and so coming to dominate politics. What the play concerns is how Antony falls not just for Cleopatra but for the Egyptian way of thinking about life, which Shakespeare takes to be a vice. Shakespeare thereby universalizes what happens in Egypt. He takes the Egyptian way of doing things as a betrayal of the human condition, which requires that men keep women, for the most part, in their place so that men can go on to do the manly thing of deciding when is the right time to get on with a war as well as how to rationally calculate who to align with and who to betray.

Shakespeare is certainly a man of ideas, and it is certainly correct for students of Shakespeare to write papers on the idea of fate in Macbeth or the role of race and convention in the world of Othello. That is not to update Shakespeare but to hit his permanent and universal themes. But what literary critics also try to do is an archeology of the reader's mind, to try to establish some never to be realized naïve reader who never really existed who looks at a work not from the point of view of its ideas but from the point of view of how it is experienced, its singular and universal emotions, the nuances of its characters, the tones that pervade the work, and so to come to treat these aspects of the work as its fundamental features. If this job is successfully done, then the way a work creates its effects is the same thing as the effect it creates, which is what it is, the ideas a rather abstracted way of getting at that, the ideas unnecessary except as a crutch to lead you into the work. From that point of view, it has to be said that Shakespeare always writes large. We put that aside as amusing or diverting when we take his works as tragedies. Bad people don't, in real life, know how bad they are, and people aren't such stereotypes of themselves, living out their own types. The world is a subtler, smoother place, where everything is ambiguous.

Shakespeare is granted a dispensation from that ordinary wisdom because he looks so deeply into the hearts of people and because he creates situations which bring out the best and worst of people in language far grander and more attuned to the emotions being projected than anything real people might say. That dispensation is, however, unnecessary, however much we have been trained to it by centuries of scholarship and by teachers who tell us of Shakespeare's subtleties. It is a more accurate reading of Shakespeare to be more crude and to notice how attracted we are by how repulsive are most of his characters, Hamlet and Antony, not just the great villains, such as Richard III, and an Othello who resists but finally gives in to his villainy. The meanness and melodrama ascribed to "Troilus and Cressida" is there all the way through, just not so cynically put. Shakespeare is not for the faint of heart.

There is another point to be made. Setting melodrama against tragedy as two different ways to contemplate the same events treats the genre as the guide to the emotions suitable to the work done in that genre and also determines how one will look at the causal relations to be taken to be at work in a particular play or novel-whether the crucial events are at the beginning or at the end, for instance. But that is to look at literature through the lens of the genre rather than to look at the literature as a representation of the world. If that is the highest value, then the entertainment provided by a work following through on the conventions of its genre is less pressing as we seek more for verisimilitude, which can be summarized as requiring people to be at every moment capable of decisions that can change their lives. They have not been placed in a tragedy or a melodrama so as to play out their roles in these, but are rather free to make them one or the other or neither or even outside of genre, as those, at least, are generally understood. People may see their lives either as tragedies wherein they roll their rocks uphill. or as melodramas wherein they are doomed to be the petty people they are, or as comedies, wherein people rise beyond their circumstances, somehow always keeping their heads above water. Not all great works do that. Anna Karenina is doomed either early on or later; Willy Loman was doomed before the play began, or maybe only when he committed suicide. Arthur Miller does not make that clear. But some great works do rise to that level, even if it takes a great work to do so.

The richness of "Great Expectations", for its part, comes from the fact that you do not know what Pip would do, from beginning to end. He might well have informed Magwitch, for there was no reason for him not to, once he was safe, but he chose not to do so, perhaps out of some sympathy for a man so out on the edge, and so it makes sense for Magwitch to show gratitude many years later. Even at the end of the novel, when, presumably, everything has been played out, you do not know whether Pip will or should pick up again with Estella, the great love of his life. That is why Dickens provides two endings. The alternatives are not a copout to satisfy his audience but recognition that even at the end things are still up in the air, stories extended by their characters through choices made after the covers are closed. And Othello, of course, whatever his motivations, might have reconsidered strangling Desdemona, even at the last minute. He is always a free man, and so he is tragic.

Even "Hamlet" can be redeemed as neither tragic nor melodramatic, the shortcomings of the play resolved by thinking it a representation of real life in that the protagonist goes back and forth, constantly second guessing himself, unable to plan a course of action, this a consequence of the existential condition that not everyone perceives which is that one can always negate the past and make a different future or step back into an old future or continue to choose to live the way one does. So what was previously described as the dramatic shortcomings of "Hamlet" is only its refusal to be either tragedy or melodrama. But that may simply revive the idea that there are superior and inferior genres of literature: the existential drama more keen than either tragedy or melodrama, those two now put on somewhat the same level. Tragedy and melodrama sometimes rise to that unnamed superior genre. Such goes one of the conundrums that fill literary theory: how is the idea of a "better" or "great" work related to the idea of a different kind of work?

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Shakespeare’s Greatest Melodramas — Wenglinsky Review

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The great works of Shakespeare from “Julius Caesar” to “Antony and Cleopatra” (with the obvious exception of “Twelfth Night”) have been largely understood as tragedies, either of what Auden would call the Christian variety, in which case we understand the central characters as suffering from a fatal

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Similar to researching the history of comedy, I also decided to look into what is a melodrama, and look at examples of good ones. After learning that melodrama's are shows or plays that tend to take the acting to more exaggerated or intense emotions and reactions, I of course went off to look at the king of melodrama's William Shakespeare for inspiration on taking reactions and emotions to over the top heights, in order to explore with another comedic aspect in theatre. In relation to Shakespeare, I looked online to find his top 10 melodrama play's, since back in the 16th-17th century melodrama were quite popular for being over the top with its acting, furthermore it works to look at play's like the bard's because I'll manage to get the most results. As a result, I ended up with a rough idea of how over the top I want to display our show, taking inspiration from the more intense moments of the play's such as Hamlet's confrontation with his mother in her bedroom, using moments with that level of intensity in acting, but imbedding it with the comedic elements myself and the rest of the group come up with in order to create that new segment of comedy and humour within our piece. Overall these sources have helped in my creative process of forming ideas for melodramatic delivery on interactions and emotions/reactions.

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Matthew Charles Berry is an English actor, comedian, musician, and writer. He is best known for his roles in comedy series such as The IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, The Mighty Boosh, Snuff Box, What We Do in the Shadows, and Toast of London, the last of which he also co-created. The series earned him the 2015 BAFTA Award for Best Male Performance in a Comedy Programme. As a musician, he has released nine studio albums.

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Matt Berry. Actor: Toast of London. Matthew Charles Berry is an English actor, comedian, musician, and writer. He is best known for his roles in comedy series such as The IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, The Mighty Boosh, Snuff Box, What We Do in the Shadows, and Toast of London, the last of which he also co-created.

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Steven Toast is the Fellini of failure. He's an actor who can empty a theatre faster than a teargas canister. He's a more disastrous on-set presence than an Omicron outbreak. And - after six years - he brazenly swaggers back on to our screens this week, proving that it isn't just a good man you can't keep down.

BBC Two's Toast of Tinseltown is an incredibly welcome return for one of the best comic creations of the last 10 years. Toast (Matt Berry) has relocated to Hollywood, following three series of Toast of London - which saw him tailspinning through demeaning bit parts, mortifying scandals and doomed auditions since its launch in 2013. Now, Toast believes he will finally get his due, and the great wrong of his omission from the acting pantheon will be righted.

There is one tiny problem, though: the acting pantheon doesn't want him. He doesn't even make it to the opening credits of Toast of Tinseltown's first episode before a furious Larry David is yelling: "Are you serious? Is this guy a real actor?"

To see Toast in action is to be treated to the enthralling spectacle of a man who unshakeably believes that he is one of the finest thespians of his generation, despite being the recipient of worst actor awards. For the whole of the first series, rotten-veg-hurling protesters greet him upon his entrance to the stage door of the production he's appearing in - dubbed London's worst play. He gets the kind of radioactive reviews that have sunk the careers of better men, has been cancelled by the literal PC police and was once buried alive by a maverick director. Toast wants to be the Milk Tray man, but ends up as Basildon Bond. He's the ultimate fish out of water, an analogue actor in the digital age.

Even his rivalries are the stuff of Greek myth - eternal conflicts played out by idiots. As the screen and stage work dries up, he is reduced to cornball voiceovers where he is tormented by the millennial inanities of hipster sound guys Danny Bear (Tim Downie) and Clem Fandango (Shazad Latif). Toast facing down these Urban Outfitters rejects who have him read out obscene hearing aid adverts, honking horns and whinnying like a horse offers a joy seldom seen on TV. You watch as the generation gap becomes a chasm.

But the real joy is his ultimate rivalry with Ray Purchase (Harry Peacock)- a taller, leaner, more handsome Toast, who looks like a Reader's Digest knitwear model. In the first episode of Toast of Tinseltown, the ludicrously OTT competition for a movie role and the affections of Mrs Purchase (Tracy-Ann Oberman) has Toast karate-chopping desks in half, with Purchase's moustache writhing so furiously it's in danger of leaping clear off his face. The raw physical presence of Peacock's scenery-chewing Purchase bumping up against Toast's unbridled contempt and hauteur make it an unmissable watch.

Berry's role as Toast is responsible for the best performances of his career. Some say that Matt Berry always plays Matt Berry and, admittedly, if you're looking for the range of Daniel Day-Lewis, you will be disappointed. But this is to miss the point - Berry's work is best seen as a single piece of performance art, a career-long excavation of a very specific kind of near-extinct masculinity - all Old Spice, coiffured hair and hammy glares. So of course there are deep echoes of previous characters: Doctor Sanchez in Darkplace, Douglas Reynholm in The IT Crowd, his perma-foiled suitor from Snuff Box. Toast, though, is the apex predator of Matt Berry characters. The rest are merely pale imitations.

This is especially true given what a showcase Toast is for Berry's unique musical output. Many episodes feature absurdist musical numbers that see him do things like duet with a moustachioed child version of himself about the shame of visiting a sex worker. Then there's the surprisingly catchy masonic ritual ditty On the Square. Given the influence of co-writer/creator Arthur Mathews, there are characters and scenes that wouldn't be out of place in Father Ted - although the prospect of a Ted/Toast cinematic universe seems likely to remain a pipe dream.

Dreams are sometimes all we have, though, and the saga of Steven Toast is all about one man's dream to achieve the recognition he manifestly does not deserve. That thick-eared tenacity is the main thing that makes him relatable. If you've ever felt out of your depth at work, bewildered by some aspect of youth culture or unjustly overlooked then all of a sudden, he starts to make sense. He'll never quit. Deny it all you like, but there's a bit of Toast in all of us.

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'One of the best comic creations of the last 10 years': Matt Berry is back as Steven Toast

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Steven Toast is the Fellini of failure. He's an actor who can empty a theatre faster than a teargas canister. He's a more disastrous on-set presence than an Omicron outbreak. And - after six years - he brazenly swaggers back on to our screens this week, proving that it isn't just a good man you can't keep down.

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For more inspiration for my character Arthur, I wanted to make his introduction quite comedic as it is in the original play, and after starting to write the script with my group, and looking over it with my tutor, I was given the actor Matt Berry to look at, along with the show Toast of London which he stars in. The show itself is a comedy about an unsuccessful "self-important" actor named Steven Gonville Toast, who attempts to become a ladies man and is usually "the bearer of bad fortune". He considers himself a success even though he isn't and goes through the series attempting to become that success he sees himself as, I definitely see aspects of this character in Arthur, being a self entitled success in the industry even though he has failed on numerous occasions, still having the determination and drive to keep aiming for new heights in his skills and dreams in hopes of reaching them someday, by taking aspects of Matt's character, such as his self entitlement, confidence, and luck in the creative industries, I'll experiment with incorporating some of those traits within Arthurs introduction. The traits this character shows for acting will definitely assist in enhancing Arthur's personality, along with his objectives and line delivery in order to heighten my performance as the director of Cummi Ffiater Bloz drama company.

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I know, because as a practicing movie critic I got to see all three endings, which involve manic explanations by the butler ( Tim Curry), who reconstructs the crimes while everybody races around the mansion and down secret passageways. My obligation now is to tell you which of three endings you should try to see, but that will be harder than it sounds. I was informed that the newspaper ads for the movie will contain the letters A, B or C, denoting which ending is being shown at which theater. I was then told which ending each of those three letters stands for. On the basis of my information, ending A is the one to go for - more fun, more satisfying. But then at the last minute Paramount called back to say they "weren't sure" whether they were right about which endings corresponded with which letters. So we're back where we started.

Here's my suggestion: Since this movie is so short anyway (88 minutes), why doesn't the studio abandon the ridiculous multiple-ending scheme and show all three endings at every theater? It would be more fun that way. And fun, I must say, is in short supply in "Clue." The plot involves the usual suspects (Col. Mustard, Miss Scarlett, Professor Plum, Mrs. Peacock, etc.) gathered in a vast mansion to learn that they are all being blackmailed. The lights go on and off, murder weapons appear and disappear, dead bodies accumulate.

Since none of these events have the slightest significance, the filmmakers have attempted to make "Clue" into a screwball comedy, with lots of throwaway gags and one liners. Some of these moments of comedy are funny. Most are not. The cast looks promising (familiar faces include Martin Mull, Lesley Ann Warren, Madeline Kahn and the wonderfully bouncy Colleen Camp), but the screenplay is so very, very thin that they spend most of their time looking frustrated, as if they'd just been cut off right before they were about to say something interesting.

Clue (1985)

Rated PG

94 minutes

Cast

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Clue movie review & film summary (1985) | Roger Ebert

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"Clue" is a comedy whodunit that is being distributed with three different endings, which is sort of silly, since it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference who did it. That makes the movie a lot like the board game which inspired it, where it didn't make any difference either, since you could always play another game.

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Recently I learned from my tutor that there was a murder mystery film based on Cluedo, since our group is using the same idea I decided to look into the plot and build my character Detective Mustard by using possibly this film, or clips of it, as inspiration. The film itself is as you would, with some characters being named after characters from the board game Cluedo, someone was murdered within the manor, and now the group must work together and solve this case on who did it, where, and with what. The only difference between our version and theirs is that instead of the characters finding out all the variables, it is set out to be a more modern day style murder mystery case with a detective included into the mix, with this in mind, I decided to watch the clip where the characters start thinking about who could have committed to murder on Yvette, it was said that "They all had the opportunity to kill her" which starts the blame game, and although this doesn't have a detective character in the scene it gives me a visual idea of how chaotic the accusations could become, allowing me to think about how Mustard can control the situation, creating him to be a calm and collected character who will do whatever it takes to crack the case and find who the killer is. However since this is a comedy, this will also help give ideas for how Arthur can compose himself when things go wrong, keeping his act as a calm and collected detective when on the inside he wants to scream out loud from all the mistakes made within the show, by using these sources for inspiration I've managed to think about what my character would do in this type of situation and how to control it, keeping everyone as 'calm' as possible as he tries to figure out who the culprit is.