Evaluation of Performance

In the Beginning straight away opens itself up to Brechtian technique as the character names are their archetypes: CHILD and PARENT. Bertolt Brecht often gave his characters archetypal names like ‘Single Parent’ or ‘Business Man’ to defamiliarise the audience from an emotional attachment to them and help them make more of a judgement on the situation. By establishing we were the children from a clear ‘mic-check’ – an Occupy movement system - at the beginning of the piece, we were already probing the audience to detach from us emotionally – we are just a representation of many other children in this world. The use of choral speaking was used for conveying large pieces of information to be then clarified by a smaller group of people. For example, the opening section of dialogue was performed by the whole cast and then repeated and reiterated by just Tyler and me, showing we were all the same archetype, the same people and telling the story to the audience. This caused many problems however, because to convey messages within large groups, articulation, consonants and listening to each other was absolutely vital. Only by speaking slowly and clearly, would the audience be able to understand what we were saying and this took a lot of practice, yet paid off in the end. Although working outside in the cold and the frost was physically enduring, it worked to our advantage for a number of reasons. First of all, having to project our voices so much outside was extremely hard work and often messages got lost in the atmosphere. This meant that an important way for us to communicate messages and ideas to the audience was through the use of signs and banners, an extremely common technique used by Brecht. We did this for two reasons – to de familiarise the audience from emotional scenes on stage and to convey ideas and slogans from the Occupy movement, the driving force and basis to the play. I created a sign that said “WE ARE THE 99%” on one side and “WILL WORK FOR MONEY” on the other to help add to the creation of the Occupy protest atmosphere and to reiterate to the audience the importance of these slogans. At one point in the piece I held up a sign saying “STOP BEING EMOTIONAL”. I did this in the final pages of In the Beginning as this is when the parent finally lets the child go to New York and everybody on stage is held in a tableau of embrace and love. Brecht believed that his characters should be representations of people in society and they are not usually 3 dimensional with deep, complex undertones. Holding up the sign to remind the audience to stop being emotionally attached was to help them detach themselves from the situation and look at it in an intelligent, less human way, and be able to make their own judgements on the situation themselves. At one point in the play, Shanon steps out of the action and, after screaming a line at Dajay, clarifies to the audience what she has just said in an emotional flurry. This takes the audience out of the situation, alienating them to what they have just seen. Her accent was dropped and so was the emotion, helping the audience to remember that they were watching a play and not a real life situation. This took place at the climax of the piece, the moment where in non-Brechtian theatre the audience’s hearts should be racing, their minds begging to know what happens next. Doing this was a risk as it could have potentially caused a loss of energy in the piece. However, jumping straight back in to the action, with the same amount of energy, tension and anxiety as before meant that the clarification to the audience was even more effective; a frozen moment in time to remove them from the emotional situation. The use of gestus in the piece was used especially clearly for the parents. During Catherine’s speech, a single-file line of parents formed behind her and they each copied one of her parental gestures. This was used to represent the echoed characteristics of the parent towards the child and convey to the audience that they are all a representation and not individual characters. Gestus was also used for the children through repeated movements such as the folding of the arms and swaying weight from one foot to the other. This created a greater sense of characterisation of an archetype, verging on a little caricature, to show the audience who we were and why we were there. The concept of a fight and a boxing ring was used as a representation of the growing anger between the two characters. Gestus and movements such as stretching and practice punches were used to successfully depict the emotions of the characters in a physical, non-emotional way. This meant the audience did not have to analyse the characters to see what they were feeling as it was being shown clearly on the stage. The problem with this was that the movement sometimes took away from what was going on onstage, but the right balance would solve this problem. The play ended with a rather uncharacteristic conga off stage, however there was a reason for this. Although it is a huge part of Brechtian theatre, we didn’t include any songs or dance in our piece. We were informed that many Brechtian plays ended in a song and a dance, much like Shakespeare’s comedies, and so the conga was to show how Brecht may have taken the audience out of the situation again, as the intensity of the ending of the play was rather emotional and they might have stopped thinking. Overall, despite the piece being extremely different to many of the others which were more light hearted and included parody songs and choreography, having analysed the techniques used, it is clear that we did create an entirely valid and successful piece of political, Brechtian theatre. It had a relevant basis in the Occupy movement and a range of techniques were used effectively to create a play that was thought provoking and engaging. Moreover, the fact that we were able to switch stages from the cold outside to the inside in such as short space of time, proved our commitment to the piece which resulted in what I believe was a very successful peformance. If, at the start of term having just been given the text, I had known how much we would get out of the seemingly naturalistic, mundane script I would have been shocked and felt extremely proud. We spoke the stage directions – “BEAT” and “EXCLAMATION POINT” - again defamiliarising the audience; we added lines; repeated sections all to create a complete production, a finished piece of theatre. Brecht always said that his scripts were not a finished product and this is certainly true for In the Beginning. The performance was complete.