Devising Process

For our devising process, we firstly used a scene that we had devised in class a few weeks ago, to do with our site. We took our idea of the children being puppets and having two people being Myra Hindley and Ian Brady who were controlling them. We used this scene as a starting point as to what we could devise around it, as we were sure we wanted to put it into our piece.

In our first rehearsal, we came up with the idea that there should be 5 children and 2 people playing Myra Hindley and Ian Brady and when we went to our site to make up a piece, we had the idea, to start with a child in each corner of our site, facing away from the audience. We then came up with the idea to have each child turn around and start saying, "Where is my Mummy?" "Have you seen my Mummy?" etc. - this gave us a really good starting point to our piece and how we wanted to make the audience feel.

We had a debate about what to do with the audience as we debated putting them inside, watching us from the staircase, however we found that this would extremely limit our work, as they wouldn't be able to hear us. We then decided to have the audience outside, but had a long discussion as to whether we should blindfold them or just have them in a line. Sarah came up with the idea that we should have the audience wandering around our site, inbetween us, as it gives the audience a chance to explore our site and makes them feel a lot more involved with the piece.

We then had the idea to incorporate the puppet scene, so as we wandered round asking the audience members if they had seen our parents, one by one Sarah and Raphy - who were playing Hindley and Brady, would slowly pull us into a circle, facing inwards. They then positioned us, to make us do childlike actions. e.g. mine was to cover and uncover my eyes, as if i was playing peek-a-boo. Then Sarah and Raphy would walk around us and when they tapped us, we had to turn out to face the audience. We had to make our actions even bigger when we turned around to make it really clear to the audience what we were doing and why.

Then we came up with the idea that we should all go around the audience again, walking around and each having a few lines that we had to keep repeating to make the audience feel scared. My line was, "I don't want to hurt you. Don't make me hurt you." Once we had each come up with our lines, we walked around saying them, getting louder and louder until Raphy shouted, "Shut up!" Then we ran to the wall with the handprints and placed our hands over the handprints as if we were the children.

We then decided that Raphy and Sarah should come up with a scene between them which describes their first meeting. We thought if we made it really romantic and sweet, it would make the audience sympathise with them and make them feel confused. So Sarah and Raphy performed a piece of physical theatre, which describes them first meeting by bumping into each other

After coming up with these ideas and performing them to Jack, we got some feedback on what else we could do/improve on.