Eleanor McHale

The Final Blog: 21/05/2016.

The Final Blog: 21/05/2016.

 ‘The Magpie & The Yorkshireman’

When the curtains closed on ‘The Magpie & The Yorkshireman’ a sense of relief washed over me. Looking back at my time in Full Frontal; bittersweet is how i would describe it. It will slowly become a sacred memory of humour and farcical comments, we never meant to be a political piece but a historical satire. 

Marketing

When discovering that we as a group were doing a comedy including the North and south divide, we originally targeted the piece to working mens clubs as our audience. In keeping with the working man being our target audience, we wanted to advertise the show specifically to that audience, and in so instead of using leaflets we decided upon using beermats to advertise our show. The design for the posters and the beermats came from the title of the piece, by including a magpie in the design and featuring downing street door in the eye of the magpie, linked with Margaret Thatcher being prime minister and the show being based on her downfall. The idea for the leaflet came from Danny’s idea of graffiti, as the design helped us to understand what the audience was expecting from our performance, and what they were hoping to see. But also what the audience can do with the leaflets was after they have been graffitied, they could be entered into a competition to win free tickets for the show. The marketing aspect of my role in this theatre company came a bigger task than I originally anticipated, but it became a hobby. Although the press could not come on the night, we offered them two free tickets to come watch the performance, and perhaps leave a review of what they thought of the show.

 

Scriptwriting

The scriptwriting process was a mixed journey with constant changes and redrafts that changed from day to day.  The struggle with the writing came with that we all had different ideas of how we wanted the script to sound, but what we did not realise is that with the help of the dramaturg, Will, it began to all become one larger piece of writing. Not long after we began writing did the play become forty-four page script that had seven characters and ten scenes. However some of the jokes in the comedy from the original draft did not stay with the script, as they in the end did not make sense with the format we decided to go with. One of the constant themes in the play we kept was the ‘Dolphinarium’ that had cultural links with Brighton at the time. I think what worked nicely in the script was how we had both light and dark in the piece we ended with. The humour came from the boys characters, but underlying that was a man who was pushed to his limit as he had lost everything. Another aspect of darkness was that Jean had suffered a miscarriage and how subtly we placed what had happened to her into the script, without outright saying the issue. We did not want the audience to have gone from such a light comedy aspect to the dark issue of miscarriage so we subtly dropped hints during the script that Brian and Jean’s marriage was not happy. Wanting to reflect the idea that Brian barely speaks to his wife in the play casting connotations that they don’t speak when they are alone either. In a way Jean only truly speaks to Harold, the hotel owner, who only begins to talk to her because he thinks she is the hotel owners wife. Jean was written slightly darker than the rest of the characters and in turn had a slightly darker back story.

Acting

Although, I have always loved acting I have never found it easy to jump into a character that has nothing to do with the person I am, and Jean was the furthest thing from who I am as a person. In becoming Jean, there were a number of exercises that I undertook to understand her as a character better. The dramaturg asked me to imagine a room where there was nothing but a mirror reflecting me, but then my face changes and I stepped into Jean’s body. I imagined how she walked, and what she held in her pockets down to the tiniest detail of what her perfume smelled like. So at the beginning of each rehearsal I imagined how Jean would feel in each scene, and how she would react to certain characters and the conversations they were having. In order to be Jean, I must first understand that her and Brian are the only ones who truly understand the gravity of the situation, and how much it would not only mean to them but there friends and family back home.

“We don’t want to change the world we just want people to laugh at it” (Spindler, 2016)

The reason political theatre was so important in our piece was because it was not meant to be political at all. In each rehearsal the performance changed from week to week as the scripts slowly dissolved and the lines began to have life, the humour began to become more prominent. However in each rehearsal the more times we ran the play, the less excited we got about it. This is when Jess started making us do energy games to improve the runs. Jess would pick an energy state ranging from catatonic to rigid, where we had to perform the scene at that state. She also made us run the scenes either fast as we could possibly do, or slow as possible; some scenes even worked working at the states she had given us so we kept them. For example, the climactic scene of Jean finally finding out about the bomb, we ran the scene at 20 x energy than originally and it made the scene a lot funnier than originally thought.

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(FullFrontal, 2016)

In one of the scenes that became one of Jean’s important scene, she is meant to be having a comical orgasm on stage. However, behind the humour Jean is talking about her broken marriage to her husband. She is discussing how Brian has not slept with her in a long time, this is also a metaphor of how he does not even speak to her anymore. I played this scene as she was so sexually frustrated that she cannot keep her orgasm in anymore, what she fails to realise is that Harold is going through the same problem with his wife. Neither of these couples are sharing how they really feel with there other half’s, instead they find solace in each other and alcohol. The orgasm scene was the hardest scene for me to act because although I wanted to make it comical I also wanted to make it realistic.

In the scene that Jean shares with Harold, this is when they first begin to discuss there lives. This first shows how alcohol forces Jean to be a lot more open than she would be say if she was sober. But again littered with context are Jeans words. On the surface they appeared as a joke aimed at the target audience, but also had the connotations of loss that Jean feels for her son. “It’s just not the same since Grandad died” has a contextual reference to her marriage not being the same since she lost her son. What I have noticed with Jean is she is very questioning; nearly all my actioning on my script had to query, to question and to ask. A point I am making about Jean is that although she is intoxicated a lot of the time, she is the only one who has the clearest mind. Due to the bar having a clear view of the whole stage, this allowed Jean to see what was going on at the lobby as well.  I wanted Jean to come across to the audience as a shrunken violet who was once full of life but to have fallen so far into alcoholism.

(Crowe, 2016)

The Final Performance.

On the 19th May 2016; The Magpie & The Yorkshireman was performed on the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre stage it began at 7:30 pm and lasted one hour. At 7 o’clock we were preparing to perform with nerves spiralling through us, it became very clear that this was going to be our last show on the LPAC stage, and indeed at university so an unwritten bond was formed. That we as a theatre company should leave knowing we had done absolutely everything to make this play amazing to the best of our ability. The performance was a blur, a laugh filled, enjoyable blur. From my first line of “I’m fu**ing gerrin em’” I tried to go above and beyond my voice capacity so much that I had no voice left the next day. I remembered my given circumstances and objectives and used them hidden through my lines. For example in the beginning scene my objective was to get to the bar at any means possible. But my super objective for the whole play was to find some quiet time to speak to my husband about our relationship, in hope that it will bring us closer together. Jean, by the end of the performance became a part of me, when she was sad I was sad, and when her and Brian finally come together in the end, it was the ending I feel she truly deserved as a character.

If Theatre Company has taught me anything it is that you come in to the module you will maybe not know the people you will spend pretty much everyday with, and I think thats pretty great. As a group we have learnt a lot from each other; things that I would never have considered being interested in until now. Bittersweet, is the word I would use, but I know that no matter what becomes of the company, if we go on to do a thousand more shows or people decide to go their own way. I know that on the 19th of May 2016 one Yorkshireman set of to Brighton to kill Margaret Thatcher; but with two southern plasterers, two distracting wives and two annoyingly over the top hotel owners, it was never gonna be easy. And it wasn’t the days were long and the pay of seemed minimal in rehearsal but in the end to hear the laughter and see the smiles that came from putting on this show, was beyond anything we had ever imagined. I can say without a doubt that ‘The Magpie and the Yorkshireman’ was single handedly the best experience I have ever had, and that was made by the people I got to share it with. I would also like to say this Theatre company would not have been possible without our director, Jess. Who was there every step of the way. Thanks for the memories.

-Until Next Time

Eleanor McHale

FullFrontal Theatre Company.

(Crowe, 2016)

Bibliography:

 Crowe, P. (2016). Flickr. [online] M.flickr.com. Available at: https://m.flickr.com/#/photos/61839232@N02/sets/72157667878020800/page3 [Accessed 22 May 2016].

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23/04/2016.

Understanding my Character.

Jean unlike her husband who blames Thatcher she begins to blame herself; I played her as this because although she seems to have a strong exterior and is always arguing with Brain she still loves him. To act like a thirty year old woman who has been married and lost everything was the hardest thing I have ever had to do and at times I began to wonder if I could ever do the character justice. But that just made me all the more determined to do this character justice. What I wanted to show between the relationship Brian and Jean shared was the respect that they subtly share for each other and at the end of the plot they both went through with the crazy scheme that had been cooked up all because they both want to move on together with their lives. The way I wanted it to look was they both got a bit of themselves back from the idea of killing Thatcher and although it fails I wanted it to seem as if the holiday did not fail because it got the couple to eventually speak to each other. Playing Jean was causing me great difficulty however our director helped me with understanding my objectives and that I had to find a way that my character would best achieve them in the fastest and most direct fashion. For Jean to understand herself she must first understand that her whole relationship relies on how well the weekend away is to her.

I played Jean Marsden, who is Brian’s wife, she has been invited to Brighton due to her husband needing to do some business in Brighton but due to her serious alcohol problem that she has Brian brings him with her. However Jean has some dark subtext, she has a different aim to the other characters in the play, and Jean is using this weekend away to reconnect with her estranged husband who does not seem to have time for her. Jean is an ex miners wife who has lived a modest life most of her life.She had met Roy when she was younger and married soon after they met there life was set to have the perfect life in her eyes. But then the mines get closed and Brian loses his job and Jean loses there baby son in a miscarriage. Brian blames Margaret Thatcher for the death of their son and Jean turns to drink. Jean is the only characters whose through line is less Brighton based and more relationship based.

To help us understand our character better our director, Jess, helped us by taking some ideas from the John Abbott questions:

Full Name: Jean Marsden.

Middle Name: Billie.
Nick Name: Gurt (Only Brian calls Jean it)
Spouse: Brian Marsden.
Age: 30 (She feels self conscious being around Annie who is younger)
Closest Relatives: Brian, her husband, she has moved to where he lives so he can remain close to the mine.
Any children: No; she miscarries.
What is your social life like: She spends half her time in bars due to turning to alcohol after she gives birth.
What people annoy you: Annie, Jean thinks that Brian has bought Annie the present due to finding her attractive.
How did you and your other half meet: They met at the pub after Jean has broken up with her long term boyfriend.

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12/04/2016.

The Beginning of the Road.
One for sorrow, two for joy…
If Theatre Company has taught me anything, it is that you must always play to your strengths, and Full Frontal’s was the North and South divide. A rivalry as old as time but still as prominent in contextual modern society as it has ever been. Although, as a group we had known each other and some of us had friendships in the group, we had never actually worked as a group before which in itself was a new prospect too us all. Each bringing a different perspective to what we wanted to work on as a company and we all had different specialities which I cannot help but think made us stronger. Originally, as a group we were swaying towards the idea of a piece written by the theatre company and although there were plenty of able scriptwriters in the cast we all wanted to be the main writer which is when the idea of us all doing it together arose. A scene a week was the timescale decided on; with that the genders divided between the four boys and the three girls. In the script meetings it started to become apparent that as a collective group we had a better understanding of comedy than other genres, although we had an idea that we wanted it to be comedic we began to realise that it was more of a modern farce. Amazingly, within a few weeks the script slowly started to come together making a ten act play that just seemed to grow into forty five pages of comedy. Within the second week we had already found a stimulus which came from a real life event. Upon deciding on the name Full Frontal TC we chose this because we wanted to show a naked version of comedy. The farcical theme came from the idea that we wanted to create humour through a black comedy style.

On the 12 October 1984, a bomb detonated in the bathroom of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, this was the room of the late Margaret Thatcher. Although five people were killed by the IRA (Provisional Irish Republican Army), they failed to kill the prime minister. Although it obviously was a delicate subject to the deaths of the victims we wanted to make light of the situation so in doing this we changed the idea of it not actually having anything to do with the IRA but a political party the YRA (Yorkshire Republican Army), that consisted of the protagonist Brian Marsden losing everything he has and blaming it on Margaret Thatcher.