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Today was our final day of rehearsals before performing what we have created to the class and it was safe to say, it was all hands-on deck today. We had to scrap the script as we never got around to completing a final draft, and hadn’t actually even finished devising our entire piece to a standard I was happy with. Not having a script really put ourselves at a disadvantage to show a good piece of work and didn’t reflect the good ideas and planning that went into creating our narrative but we should have worked on our time planning more and more people should have taken responsibility to get things done, especially in the script instead of it being down to one person to write it up. A positive we took away from this rehearsal is that we managed to finish devising (used loosely) our piece so we could go into the performance confident we knew how certain events were going to take place and what we do between these events that really shape our piece.

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Disappointingly we have had to scrap a character from our piece which annoyingly as still set us back despite trying to prepare in case of this happening. Instead of carrying on writing the script to try and get it finished I have had to now go back through and replace or take out their characters lines. I still haven’t received all the character profiles and monologues from some members of my group, again, delaying the progression of the script. During this time we had to rehearse we had to do the same as the script and go back through and take out or replace their character for the scenes that they are in.

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Because of the length of time it’s taken us to get to this stage we have had to start devising the piece without a full script which we really struggled with as we couldn’t be specific with what we were devising. We also struggled devising our piece in the round staging as being on a 360 degree stage really opened us up more which made it difficult to decide where we were going to put things like the counter where I would be preparing the food as it’s not something you can move around due to its size. It’s safe to say this was one of our less productive rehearsals as we struggled to work out how to devise without a script and as none of us have performed or worked on a in the round stage I found it hard to keep my members of the group on task and motivated.

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I sent everyone off to write up their character bios and their characters monologues describing their past and how they got to be where they are now. These character monologues are very important to the piece as it builds character and shows the difference of social class and the effect money can have on someone’s life. While they were writing up their monologues I began work on writing up our actual script for the piece. From the outset, I really struggled to use the language they would have used during that time period so Jacob suggested that we use language that we would use today but staying away from using any slang. This made the writing process so much easier and would make it easier for the audience to actually understand the plot as well, as showing how a building would collapse and trapping a group of people is always going to be a challenge.

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Carrying on from where the last rehearsal left off we continued to write out our plot place. Writing the second half of the piece was far easier as we didn’t have to worry about whether this person was going to attend the final performance. This gave us more creative freedom as having less characters makes it easier to split scenes up and made the process of writing the plot far easier as everyone could contribute ideas without having to fit someone else in. I think having the plot where everyone gets out with a happy ending was too predictable so we decided on two characters to keep alive and have the rest die due to the lack of air in the trapped kitchen. This would hopefully shock the audience and is  not the ending they expected or wanted. We have left space for character monologues to get an insight to who these people are and how they got to where they are.

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Having created our narrative and characters we got to work to write up a full length piece in terms of what we actually wanted and how we were going to get all these characters to work together. Upon writing up this specific plot plan we thought that maybe not all these characters will get along with one another to create a more realistic narrative for the time it’s set. James’ character of the hotel manager outcasts himself from the rest of the trapped group as he views them as less important and a lower social class despite the situation they are in together. Usually the hotel owner is used to telling people what to do and them going to do it, but because the group to go him and ask what they should do, the hotel owner doesn’t know what do to do and breaks down showing that no matter how cruel people can be, they’re still human too. Because we haven't seen an improvement of commitment from the previously mentioned individual we have given them only a short amount of time on stage before being killed off.

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Now that we have our idea of what we want to have as our idea we spent the lesson going through a brief overview of the characters, the plot written on paper to decide which direction we want to take in our piece. Unfortunately, we are already experiencing issues with attendance in our group due to an individual, but we as a group aren’t going to let that hold us back so when we were allocating roles (see below) we gave that individual a small role until we see further commitment to the piece. James came up with the setting of a hotel as it’s a place of work that allows many people from different backgrounds to work in many different areas in the hotel, this is perfect to bring all our characters together.

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For this rehearsal, we carried on trying to come up with an idea of what we wanted to do with the setting of the great fire of London. The night before I thought about the staging of in the round and thought about a group of people being trapped in this space because of a building collapse before of the fire. We then went on to say how we should have all the characters from different social class and backgrounds to make every character different and to explore the differences in social class at a time where there was quite the difference between someone who was well off and someone that was working class. We also wanted to show that in certain situations where you come from doesn’t matter and that we should all work together, whoever we are.

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After visiting Denis Severs House we discovered that the notes and pictures we took is what would be or stimulus. I took photos of a really aesthetically please china display and a poster advertising a play from the 1800’s as the big bold writing saying ‘THE SLAVE’ really stood out for me. Once we were put into our groups I shared the photos to get an idea of what we were going to do.

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We explored ideas of historical events that the house might have lived through, for example we spoke about the Bitz, the plague and the great fire of London. This then developed into the idea of a slave that gets away during the great fire of London and helps people instead of running away. We decided against the slave breaking free aspect as we struggled to create an interesting plot/ narrative for this idea but we wanted to keep the setting of the great fire of London as that would be a good and interesting setting for our piece.