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As we decided to base our piece in a mental asylum with the audience as patients I wrote a monologue, including information, to introduce our piece. Hello everybody, I am Rosie and for today I am your nurse so please try to stay as calm as possible, even though I know it's really hard for every single one of you, but it's not easy for us working for you. Even though everything is under control, I have to listen knowing you tried to commit while you've been under the same roof as me and the amount of people that I've walked in while they're in the middle of committing is frightful. The amount of times that patients, just like you, have broke things including picture frames and threatened me thinking that either I was going to hurt them or I was their voice it's just dreadful, but to top it off the worst bit is that I can't even go home and speak to someone about my day, as everything is confidential, so I have to keep everything that anyone does to myself and it just builds up in my mind. Artaud links the mental illnesses of patients that are in a mental asylum into his piece by reflecting it on everyday life of what patients with severe mental illnesses are like due to it being confidential and with him being a patient, he knows everything. So he believed that he should show the truth of behind the doors of a mental asylum.

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Antonin Artaud was influenced by a painting by Lucas Van Leyden called Lot and his daughters and The Marx Brothers, who were comedy actors, Surrealism, symbolism and Balinese dancers, as when he went to see them in 1931, he found out that they  told a story of Hindu, mainly fighting with their gods, concentrating on hand movements and they didn’t include physical contact and they were all movement based. Hays. J (2013) states that ‘Depending on how you look at it dancers have traditionally played characters and acted and actors have traditionally danced around a lot.’ (Hays.J, 2013) They used gestures and facial expressions rather than dialogue. With him having depression and not being able to speak to his parents, while growing up, he enjoyed this as it seemed personal to him. He also wanted to change the style of theatres.

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While performing, I think I did well on performing a subject out of my comfort zone, but I could have improved on being more confident with my script, as i kept forgetting my lines and also my projection as I didn’t speak very loud. So if we ever had the chance to do this performance again, I would do better by rehearsing more and the more confident I am with the script, the better my projection will be.

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Throughout rehersals, as we devised our own script, we didn’t have long to rehearse. When we first rehearsed, we ran through the script a couple of times to get used to the storyline, then we got up and mixed our ideas with it. During every rehearsal we kept running through the script with the script and once we was more comfortable, we tried to do it without the script, to see how much that we knew and then rather than stopping if we didn’t know it, then we improvised, with us knowing the basic and we kept doing this until we was confident with the script. We didn't use any certain techniques expect how patients would have been treated in a mental asylum. We had company problems of rehersals, as my other peer was working alot so we hardly had any rehearsal time but I overcome this by learning my script in my own time, but I think this was the reason why I wasn’t super confident with my lines with not having rehersals to bounce of each other.

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Our first idea was musical theatre but due to us wanting to do different types we changed it. Then we discussed to do Into the woods as we could make it to suit us both, so she could sing and I could sing or speak through character. Then we changed it to acting to do Theatre of cruelty, by Antonin Artaud as it was something that she was comfortable with and I didn't have much knowledge of Theatre of cruelty and serious theatre isn't usually the type of theatre that I would take part in, so I thought that I would push myself out of my comfort zone, so we both agreed that this would be interesting for us to do.

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This is where you lock up people with mental health. Psychiatric hospital is a hospital for people with severe mental health to get help. They give you medicine and treatment to help cure your mental health. Depending on how bad you are, your door may be locked to keep you and other patients safe. They hide everything from you, from body wash to razors, so you have no way of trying to hurt yourself. So when you needed to wash, you have to have supervision so you don’t try to either eat the body wash or drown yourself. So it helps you to cope without harming. As reported by Metro (2015) They state ‘I trained as a mental health nurse at university but nothing could prepare me for the real world of mental health nursing.’ (Metro, 2015) As also reported by Metro (2017) They state, ‘Every half an hour, a nurse or healthcare assistant would open my door to check I was safe.’ - This suggests that psychiatric hospitals are under control.

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We was influenced by a Theatre of cruelty workshop that we took part in. As students, we laid down in the dark on the stage with relaxing music and the teacher addressing us a story that we had to imagine but pick our own basic information, so we got relaxed. Once we got relaxed, the music changed to horror music and actors came onto the stage making sounds, wearing masks, using props and trying to scare us with being relaxed. This didn't scare me as a student had done the workshop before but it still made me feel uncomfortable, which was Artaud's aim.

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Cooper, S. and Mackey, S. (2000) Drama and Theatre Studies. New Revised and Expanded Edition. Cheltenham: Stanley Thornes Ltd.

Editors, TheFamousPeople.com. (2017) Antonin Artaud Biography. [Online] https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/antoine-marie-joseph-artaud-749.php [Accessed: 22nd November 2017]

Encyclopaedia. (2017) Theatre of Cruelty Experimental Theatre. rom[Online] Available from: https://www.britannica.com/art/Theatre-of-Cruelty [Accessed: 12th December 2017]

Hays, J. (2013) Balinese Dance. [Online] http://factsanddetails.com/indonesia/Minorities_and_Regions/sub6_3h/entry-4030.html [Accessed: 12th December 2017]

Kingdon, D, and Turkington, D. (2008) Cognitive Therapy of Schizophrenia. New York: The Guilford Press

Metro news...But not as you know it. (2015) Mental health nurse reveals the reality of working on the ward. [Online] Available from: http://metro.co.uk/2015/08/28/mental-health-nurse-reveals-the-reality-of-working-on-the-ward-5364987/

[Accessed: 3rd December 2017].

Metro news...But not as you know it. (2017) What it's really like behind the doors of a psychiatric hospital. [Online] http://metro.co.uk/2017/10/20/what-its-really-like-behind-the-doors-of-a-psychiatric-hospital-6957479/

[Accessed: 5th December 2017].

Mind for better mental health. (2015) Crisis services. [Online] https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/guides-to-support-and-services/crisis-services/hospital-admission/#.WgrHp7acai4

[Accessed: 5th December 2017].

NHS. (2016) Schizophrenia. [Online] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/schizophrenia/ [Accessed: 12th December 2017].

The Time Chambers. (2017) The History of the Asylum. [Online] http://thetimechamber.co.uk/beta/sites/asylums/asylum-history/the-history-of-the-asylum [Accessed: 26th November 2017].

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Schizophrenia is a long term severe mental health issue. It affects your brain completely including the way you think and everyday life situations. The symptoms include hallucinations including hearing their own voice or hearing other peoples talking about you, delusions, lack of motivation, slow movements, change of mood, behaviour, emotions, changed sleeping pattern and poor hygiene. It doesn't appear on its own, it’s usually different problems mixed together and can be caused from a great deal of personal problems, including drug addictions, deaths, depression and over time things got worse, but it depends on the individual as no one knows the correct reason. As reported by the  NHS (2016) ‘Drugs don't directly cause schizophrenia, but studies have shown drug misuse increases the risk of developing schizophrenia.’ (NHS, 2016) This links to Artaud and his addiction to drugs and his schizophrenia.

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Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud was born on the 4th September 1896, in Marseilles, France. He was born into a big and strict religious family. His parents had 9 children but only him and his sister survived but he did catched meningitis when he was 4, which he ended up having a lifelong fear of. In 1910 he published his first poem which he was influenced by Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe. In 1915, he got diagnosed with depression and destroys his poems so due to this he decided to join the army, but he ended up getting kicked out due to sleepwalking, which is dangerous. He went back to France to live with his parents, but due to his depression getting worse, they wanted him to stay in a sanatorium and he was prescribed opium, but he soon realised that he was addicted to all types of drugs, which affected him with his personal relationships. But then in 1920 he moved to Paris to become a writer but realised he was interested in theatre. He became a playwright, poet, actor, theatre director and essay writer. In 1924 he submits poems, which ended up being turned down, so he joined the surrealist movement theatre and in 1925 he becomes the director of the surrealist research centre, but he ended up getting kicked out, as he was seen as a threat. In 1931, he moved back in with his mum and stayed in cheap hotels as he was poor, but due to him being poor, he had a government fund for writers so he could carry on writing and in 1933 The theatre and the plague was a huge success for theatre of cruelty, as it left the audience disturbed, but in 1934 he wrote The Cency, but it didn’t interest the audience, so that was the end of theatre of cruelty but he had to stop anyway as his drug addiction got in the way and for some unknown reason, his treatments still wasn't working. He suffered from depression and spent most of his older life in asylums, due to him suffering from schizophrenia. He then died on 4th March 1948, due to cancer.

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Theatre of cruelty, was found in 1926. The aim of theatre of cruelty was to challenge, shock the senses and get to the emotions of the audience with no limits and he preferred the audience to be surrounded by the actors to make them feel more into the play. They did this by putting their audience in the middle of the floor, so the actors performed all around them, so they had to keep turning around. Inees (1993) states that, ‘The spectator will be shaken and set on edge by the internal dynamism of the spectacle.’ (Inees, 1993, p.65) The actors used their emotions, including whispering and shouting, to make the audience believe that what they're seeing is true and the so they used lighting and sound to make it more over the top. They even used oversized puppets.

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Our ideas were to do Theatre of cruelty by Antonin Artaud and base it in a mental asylum with a patient suffering from schizophrenia and how they would have been treated. We decided that we was going to devised a script rather than use a current one. We thought that the scene could start quiet with the patient asleep, to go into their monologue of them suffering from schizophrenia and being addicted to their medicine, but they don't want to take it due to their voices. When the patient gets locked in and tied down, it's all a dream and goes back to just being in the head, thinking something bad is going to happen, so they think of worse situations. Our idea of reading out the information is to act in character as if we are in a mental asylum and the audience are patients, to show them what it's like to work in a mental asylum and how it links into how artaud uses mental illnesses into his piece. The lighting we thought off included warm, soft colours, red and dark flashing lights, white lights and blackouts.The sounds included increasing noises including tap dripping, talking, evil laughing, humming, door slamming and door locking. The props we thought of are a chair and rope.