Hayley Spindler

Here it is lads, the day I no, the day we put on The Magpie and The Yorkshireman

With an explosion and a cry from Michael Jackson that was it, all our hard work over these few months had culminated in a performance that got the enthusiastic review off my house-mate; “yeah.. it were alright” (Rebecca Burney, 2016)

Let there be light! (And sound too I suppose that helps) 

With the technical side of the show, I designed the lighting and sound within the show by correlating the needs of the script with the want of the director. Therefore, the lighting was naturalistic, apart from a neon look for the bar to show the 80’s era and the blue wash in the flashback which was to signify to the audience that the scene was a stand alone scene that did not take place at the hotel but rather in a pub prior to the hotel. With all the lights being LED’s already on the rig set up was easy with our company not wanting particularly heavy technical requirements but rather a focus on the action happening on stage.

For the sound we wanted nothing before 1985, a landline telephone ring not the iPhone ringtone. And sourcing most sounds was fairly simple. The track we used within the play was Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round’ mentioned within the opening monologue, at which the play begins with it at number 1 in the charts. This provided cultural context to the play firmly associating itself within that era. The other song I picked (which at a final decision got cut due to wanting the scene change to be snappier) was The Smiths ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ This was picked due to a perfect representation of Brian and Jeans relationship at that point in time “All men have secrets and here is mine so let it be known, we have been through hell and high tide, I can surely rely on you, and yet you start to recoil, heavy words are so lightly thrown, but I’d still leap in front of a flying bullet for you” (Marr & Morrissey, 1984) This symbolism was chosen to show Brian’s hopelessness within trying to hide his assassination plot from his wife.

A sound track I had to edit was the song labelled ‘Morning Song’ which symbolised the start of a new day wanting cheesy I layered birdsong over Edvard Grieg – Peer Gynt an instrumental piece of music that is often associated with the sun rising. This I did with a programme named audacity something I had previously used at university; the result of which can be heard below.

Update – A Change in Heart

Within the rehearsal process and editing of the script, the was an obstacle that seemed to be preventing the play to be a smooth running piece that we wanted to achieve. After the Director, Producer and Dramaturg met up I received a phone call from our Director asking if they would mind if I did not play Tina but instead Phyllis the Hotel Owner that was to be played previously by the director. Due to already struggling to be able to give Tina, such a complicated character justice, I agreed wholeheartedly to this change believing that it would be the best for my own performance and everyone elses. This change meant that all of my given circumstances had changed meaning for me to go back to the John Abbott character questions and begin the sense of Phyllis and her differences to Tina.

A backstory of Phyllis; Growing up middle class with a father who owns a hotel chain she met Harold when she was 18 helping out her father with working in the hotel. Due to Harolds desire to please everyone he went above and beyond at the beginning of their relationship and this impressed Phyllis. They then got married and took over her dad’s hotel in Brighton ‘La Passage de Retour’ due to Harold living in Brighton and knowing the area well. This is where their marriage became strained and slowly evolved into the dysfunctional relationship that the audience sees during the play. “Objectives create plot” (Alfreds, 2007, p.50) Phyllis’ objective remain similar throughout excluding the first scene in which Phyllis just wants to go to the spa as quickly as possible. Most revolved around Phyllis wanting one day at the hotel to just run smoothly with nothing going wrong, hence why Phyllis is constantly trying to organise the chaos around her.

Phyllis and Harolds strained relationship is partially to do with Phyllis’ standards being too high and Harolds fondness to cut corners. This often leads to Phyllis becoming quite stern with Harold and she slowly takes over the role of wife and mother – a combination Harold does not want! Phyllis herself does still love her husband however by her standards being too high we see her constantly disappointed by Harold leaving her frustrated with her husband. However, she stays fiercely protective over him, which is seen in the climatic scene when she comes out to defend her husband over guests.

Abbott’s Questions (a selection):

1. What is your full name? Phyllis Anabell Reynolds nee White.
2. Do you have a nickname? Harold calls me ‘dove’ when he wants something.
3. How old are you? 30 (born in 1955)
4. Who are your closest relatives? My father, though since running the hotel in Brighton I don’t really get to see him so it’s just me and my husband Harold.
5. How do you feel about your martial state? Happy, I do love Harold although that may seem to others to be deep deep down inside my own emotions.
6. Do you have any children? None – thankfully!
7. How do you feel about this? Happy, I’ve never really been good with children and always thought they would just get in the way of my career.
8. What sort of people annoy you? People that come up with excuses that mean nothing when they should have just done whatever was needed in the first place. This  often leads to me to trying to call Harold out on his excuses due to having to hear them day in day out and although I know that I shouldn’t do it in front of the guests I enjoy watching him panic hoping every time that he’ll finally learn his lesson.

(Abbott, 2012, p.87)

Even with these 8 questions Phyllis’ character and her level headedness begins to come clear and how this clashes with her husband. Harold and Phyllis are heavily inspired on Basil and Sybil Fawlty of Fawlty Towers. This television couple when actress Prunella Scales (who plays Sybil) first read the script only had one question “Well why did they get married?” (Scales, 2014) Wanting our audience to have a similar feeling we went to portray a strained marriage that did originally come from love but has just gone beyond love into routine.

With embodying Phyllis, Abbott states “an actor may realise their character has a similar disposition to a person that they know” and if so “they should observe them and see if they can copy that person’s rhythms, movements and shapes” (2012, p.91) For the close correlation I had the (fun but only at the beginning) research of watching Fawlty Towers to analyse how Prunella held herself and her gestures to be able to accurately portray a character of similar background.

Character Meeting – Tina

Christina Jones nee Taylor, my character whom is married to Jack Jones Sr. Is a complicated character whom once my character meeting with the director Jess Bark became ironed out. We used John Abbott’s techniques within fleshing out a character in which we created key moments within Tina’s life in which would lead a person towards such an extreme profession. With this Tina’s backstory began to flesh out;

• At 14 Tina’s school shut down due to lack of school funds leaving her unable to complete school
• Therefore once at home, she began to see much more of her older brothers friend Jack Jones Sr. known by Jones, the two then began seeing each other.
• During this time Tina’s older brother went to fight in the Falklands war thus dying leaving Tina having to provide for her family. This lead her to looking for her father whom turns out to be part of the underhand gang system in London.
• However at 16 Tina fell pregnant and due to her mums insistence and approval Jones and Tina had somewhat of a shotgun wedding before she gave birth to their daughter.
• With this Tina had a very different life to which she had imagined, no longer were her dreams of university possible but her life of changing nappies with no qualifications apart from a career within assassinations.

Within having such an extreme character having the character meeting with the director was essential and an extreme amount of help, by looking into Tina’s given circumstances I could begin to piece a character together.

Script Writing

After we fleshed out the backbone of the plot with the characters of 2 hotel owners and 3 couples, and the concept of creating a farcical comedy a group of 6 from our company all went home with a scene to write, my own being the reveal of my character, Tina, being an assassin who has the same aim of blowing up Thatcher as the main character, Brian. This scene worked out mediocre as we all realised that it was easier to write comedy in groups, bouncing off each other than alone. From that point onwards we split into 2 separate writing groups with a primary school mindset – that the other gender has cooties.

By having two writing groups we evenly split the play and started writing, this went much better with having instant feedback on whether a joke was actually funny or just as it were in some cases, just funny to me the individual. After finishing our first half draft we read it through as a company and which ran at 56 minutes without the ending scenes. At this point we realised that now we had quantity we had to focus on quality. But by having the overly explained plot we looked through and pinpointed what scenes did not need to include in the final draft and with this moment we came to the long arduous task of editing and fine tuning our script to have the best script for our company.

This also came with the edit, the change within the hotel owners, from sexually ambiguous to just ambiguous, this helped us within our mission statement within fine tuning the comedy to a wider audience.

Full Frontal Beginnings

Our first meeting as a theatre company had us sitting down discussing the key concepts that we wanted to pursue for our big final module, comedy was an immediate agreement from a group of people who enjoy laughing and not taking anything too seriously. Roles were also rapidly decided with everyone having a clear idea of what they wanted to put into this performance. My own roles were performer and tech designer, this is due to my interest within being an actor and the enjoyment I had when designing the sound in a previous module in second year.

At first the style of comedy became a discussion point with people wanting black comedy, people wanting to restage a classic comedy and people wanting to write their own comedy.  Due to 2016 being the 100 year anniversary of World War I we considering writing a comedy set within the trenches, with this three of our members took the responsibility into exploring this concept and seeing if they could come up with something that would be possible to produce into a full show, this is due to doubts within the company over whether new writings would be more beneficial towards us than old. “The next most important ingredient […] is a script.” (Abbott, 2012, p.59) So with this in mind we wanted a firm idea before going ahead with a venture that could end up fruitless.

However, when these three came back they read out what was to become the first draft of our prologue. A story of one man’s struggle against his loss of livelihood, his loss of community and his loss of family – all culminating within his drastic choice to seek his revenge, the choice to blow up the Prime Minister of 1985, Margaret Thatcher. Of course, this came with us as a company making sure that we did not want an audience to think that we were creating a political piece but definitely a comedy. People may question why we picked a sensitive historical figure whom like Marmite, divides the crowds opinion, we wanted to challenge comedy and what it is people can laugh at, as the very famous comedic writer and actor John Cleese says; “All humor is critical. If you start to say we mustn’t, we mustn’t criticize or offend them then humor is gone. With humor goes a sense of proportion. And then as far as I’m concerned you’re living in 1984.” (Cleese, 2016) As stated in our mission statement, we don’t want to change the world – we just want people to laugh at it. And with this we had the beginnings of what would later become The Magpie and The Yorkshireman, our debut show.

Works Cited.

Abbott, J. (2012) The Acting Book. London: Nick Hern Books.

Alfreds, M. (2007) Different Every Night, Freeing The Actor. London: Nick Hern Books.

Cleese, J. (2016) Political Correctness Can Lead to an Orwellian Nightmare. [speech] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAK0KXEpF8U [Accessed 1st May 2016]

Crowe, P. (2016). Flickr. [online] M.flickr.com. Available at: https://m.flickr.com/#/photos/61839232@N02/sets/72157667878020800/page3 [Accessed 21st May 2016].

Marr & Morrissey (1984) What Difference Does It Make? [cd track] 3 minutes 14 seconds. The Smiths. Pluto Studios: Manchester.

Turner, D. (2016) Google Drive. [online] Available at: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B3RfKkyAHBzdOW9CZVMxa1cwUlU&usp=drive_web [Accessed 14th May 2016]

Scales, P. (2014) Prunella Scales looks back on her time in Fawlty Towers. [interview] Available from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1278342/Prunella-Scales-looks-time-Fawlty-Towers-2014.html [Accessed 10th May 2016]

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Let there be light! (And sound too I suppose that helps) TECH DAY – 14.05.2016

With the technical side of the show, I designed the lighting and sound within the show by correlating the needs of the script with the want of the director. Therefore, the lighting was naturalistic, apart from a neon look for the bar to show the 80’s era and the blue wash in the flashback which was to signify to the audience that the scene was a stand alone scene that did not take place at the hotel but rather in a pub prior to the hotel. With all the lights being LED’s already on the rig set up was easy with our company not wanting particularly heavy technical requirements but rather a focus on the action happening on stage.

For the sound we wanted nothing before 1985, a landline telephone ring not the iPhone ringtone. And sourcing most sounds was fairly simple. The track we used within the play was Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round’ mentioned within the opening monologue, at which the play begins with it at number 1 in the charts. This provided cultural context to the play firmly associating itself within that era. The other song I picked (which at a final decision got cut due to wanting the scene change to be snappier) was The Smiths ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ This was picked due to a perfect representation of Brian and Jeans relationship at that point in time, the song was chosen to show Brian’s hopelessness within trying to hide his assassination plot from his wife.

A sound track I had to edit was the song labelled ‘Morning Song’ which symbolised the start of a new day wanting cheesy I layered birdsong over Edvard Grieg – Peer Gynt an instrumental piece of music that is often associated with the sun rising. This I did with a programme named audacity something I had previously used at university. This was also used when clipping the sound files down to an appropriate time for the play before bringing all of the sound to QLab to begin merging lighting and sound together for the Stage Manager to call and cue on the night.

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Update – A Change in Heart – 23.04.2016

Within the rehearsal process and editing of the script, the was an obstacle that seemed to be preventing the play to be a smooth running piece that we wanted to achieve. After the Director, Producer and Dramaturg met up I received a phone call from our Director asking if they would mind if I did not play Tina but instead Phyllis the Hotel Owner that was to be played previously by the director. Due to already struggling to be able to give Tina, such a complicated character justice, I agreed wholeheartedly to this change believing that it would be the best for my own performance and everyone elses. This change meant that all of my given circumstances had changed meaning for me to go back to the John Abbott character questions and begin the sense of Phyllis and her differences to Tina.

A backstory of Phyllis; Growing up middle class with a father who owns a hotel chain she met Harold when she was 18 helping out her father with working in the hotel. Due to Harolds desire to please everyone he went above and beyond at the beginning of their relationship and this impressed Phyllis. They then got married and took over her dad’s hotel in Brighton ‘La Passage de Retour’ due to Harold living in Brighton and knowing the area well. This is where their marriage became strained and slowly evolved into the dysfunctional relationship that the audience sees during the play. Within objectives, Phyllis’ objective remain similar throughout excluding the first scene in which Phyllis just wants to go to the spa as quickly as possible. Most revolved around Phyllis wanting one day at the hotel to just run smoothly with nothing going wrong, hence why Phyllis is constantly trying to organise the chaos around her.

Phyllis and Harolds strained relationship is partially to do with Phyllis’ standards being too high and Harolds fondness to cut corners. This often leads to Phyllis becoming quite stern with Harold and she slowly takes over the role of wife and mother – a combination Harold does not want! Phyllis herself does still love her husband however by her standards being too high we see her constantly disappointed by Harold leaving her frustrated with her husband. However, she stays fiercely protective over him, which is seen in the climatic scene when she comes out to defend her husband over guests.

Given Circumstances:

• She is married to Harold.
• She is fiercely protective over Harold, believing that she is the only one who can terrorize him
• She gets easily frustrated by Harolds excuses

Abbott’s Questions (a selection):

1. What is your full name? Phyllis Anabell Reynolds nee White.
2. Do you have a nickname? Harold calls me ‘dove’ when he wants something.
3. How old are you? 30 (born in 1955)
4. Who are your closest relatives? My father, though since running the hotel in Brighton I don’t really get to see him so it’s just me and my husband Harold.
5. How do you feel about your martial state? Happy, I do love Harold although that may seem to others to be deep deep down inside my own emotions.
6. Do you have any children? None – thankfully!
7. How do you feel about this? Happy, I’ve never really been good with children and always thought they would just get in the way of my career.
8. What sort of people annoy you? People that come up with excuses that mean nothing when they should have just done whatever was needed in the first place. This  often leads to me to trying to call Harold out on his excuses due to having to hear them day in day out and although I know that I shouldn’t do it in front of the guests I enjoy watching him panic hoping every time that he’ll finally learn his lesson.

(Abbott, 2012, p.87)

Just by these questions Phyllis’ character and her level headedness begins to come clear and how this clashes with her husband. Harold and Phyllis are heavily inspired on Basil and Sybil Fawlty of Fawlty Towers. This television couple when actress Prunella Scales (plays Sybil) first read the script only had one question “Well why did they get married?” (Scales, 2014) Wanting our audience to have a similar feeling we went to portray a strained marriage that did originally come from love but has just gone beyond love into routine.

With embodying Phyllis, Abbott states “an actor may realise their character has a similar disposition to a person that they know” and if so “they should observe them and see if they can copy that person’s rhythms, movements and shapes” (2012, p.91) For the close correlation I had the (fun but only at the beginning) research of watching Fawlty Towers to analyse how Prunella held herself and her gestures to be able to accurately portray a character of similar background.

---

Character Meeting – Tina 08.03.2016

Christina Jones nee Taylor, my character whom is married to Jack Jones Sr. Is a complicated character whom once my character meeting with the director Jess Bark became ironed out. We used John Abbott’s techniques within fleshing out a character in which we created key moments within Tina’s life in which would lead a person towards such an extreme profession. With this Tina’s backstory began to flesh out;

• At 14 Tina’s school shut down due to lack of school funds leaving her unable to complete school
• Therefore once at home, she began to see much more of her older brothers friend Jack Jones Sr. known by Jones, the two then began seeing each other.
• During this time Tina’s older brother went to fight in the Falklands war thus dying leaving Tina having to provide for her family. This lead her to looking for her father whom turns out to be part of the underhand gang system in London.
• However at 16 Tina fell pregnant and due to her mums insistence and approval Jones and Tina had somewhat of a shotgun wedding before she gave birth to their daughter.
• With this Tina had a very different life to which she had imagined, no longer were her dreams of university possible but her life of changing nappies with no qualifications apart from a career within assassinations.

Within having such an extreme character having the character meeting with the director was essential and an extreme amount of help, by looking into Tina’s given circumstances I could begin to piece a character together.

---

Script Writing – 29.02.2016

After we fleshed out the backbone of the plot with the characters of 2 hotel owners and 3 couples, and the concept of creating a farcical comedy a group of 6 from our company all went home with a scene to write, my own being the reveal of my character, Tina, being an assassin who has the same aim of blowing up Thatcher as the main character, Brian. This scene worked out mediocre as we all realised that it was easier to write comedy in groups, bouncing off each other than alone. From that point onwards we split into 2 separate writing groups with a primary school mindset – that the other gender has cooties.

By having two writing groups we evenly split the play and started writing, this went much better with having instant feedback on whether a joke was actually funny or just as it were in some cases, just funny to me the individual. After finishing our first half draft we read it through as a company and which ran at 56 minutes without the ending scenes. At this point we realised that now we had quantity we had to focus on quality. But by having the overly explained plot we looked through and pinpointed what scenes did not need to include in the final draft and with this moment we came to the long arduous task of editing and fine tuning our script to have the best script for our company.

This also came with the edit, the change within the hotel owners, from sexually ambiguous to just ambiguous, this helped us within our mission statement within fine tuning the comedy to a wider audience.

---

Full Frontal Beginnings – 29.01.2016

Our first meeting as a theatre company had us sitting down discussing the key concepts that we wanted to pursue for our big final module, comedy was an immediate agreement from a group of people who enjoy laughing and not taking anything too seriously. Roles were also rapidly decided with everyone having a clear idea of what they wanted to put into this performance. My own roles were performer and tech designer, this is due to my interest within being an actor and the enjoyment I had when designing the sound in a previous module in second year.

At first the style of comedy became a discussion point with people wanting black comedy, people wanting to restage a classic comedy and people wanting to write their own comedy.  Due to 2016 being the 100 year anniversary of World War I we considering writing a comedy set within the trenches, with this three of our members took the responsibility into exploring this concept and seeing if they could come up with something that would be possible to produce into a full show, this is due to doubts within the company over whether new writings would be more beneficial towards us than old. “The next most important ingredient […] is a script.” (Abbott, 2012, p.59) So with this in mind we wanted a firm idea before going ahead with a venture that could end up fruitless.

However, when these three came back they read out what was to become the first draft of our prologue. A story of one man’s struggle against his loss of livelihood, his loss of community and his loss of family – all culminating within his drastic choice to seek his revenge, the choice to blow up the Prime Minister of 1985, Margaret Thatcher. Of course, this came with us as a company making sure that we did not want an audience to think that we were creating a political piece but definitely a comedy. People may question why we picked a sensitive historical figure whom like Marmite, divides the crowds opinion, we wanted to challenge comedy and what it is people can laugh at, as stated in our mission statement, we don’t want to change the world – we just want people to laugh at it. And with this we had the beginnings of what would later become The Magpie and The Yorkshireman, our debut show.