Bouncers

My interpretation of Bouncers is that it was a weird play because there are the performers will have to play 3 characters each including “the lads” “the women” and “the Bouncers”. Each character that one actor may play resembles each other. The bouncers and lads are just after sex with any thing that walks and the women seem to be slightly laid back. Bouncers is set in Hull, north of England and nights out on the town are wild and this play is about an average Friday or Saturday night in the 1980’s and I think the playwright sees the pointlessness in it.

Which I see his point because you work and graft for five days and get paid for it, then go out for one night and waste it on drink and cigarettes when they could be saving for a mortgage or a new car. The main target for this is the working class. I think this because the upper class and middle class don’t go out on the town and get drunk because they would see it as absurd and hooligan behaviour. In Bouncers there a few settings for the play.

This helps you understand the meaning and pointlessness of it all. Firstly there is the club/pub next there is the hairdressers, this is where the actors will have to play women, I would suggest over the top stereotypical type, next there is the home of the women and lastly the is the scene in the toilet, which definitely should be acted over top and in a humorous way. We did this example in class which I will explain later.

The point that are covered are: alcoholism, this tells us by that the consumption of alcohol is at a high level in the play next there is sexual morals, this suggests that sex could be a key issue, working class life says to me that it is targeted at the working class, next there is “happy outside and sad inside” feeling for the real life people that do this and finally in this play, hopelessness is presented because what they are doing is getting there lives nowhere but wasting there money.

Pointlessness of this kind of live criticises this kind of behaviour but this happens because people get stressed and run down and they need something to pick themselves up again. People do this again and again and become addictive to this and the addictiveness can kill and maybe this is what John Godber was trying to emphasise about the play. Because people can die from stupid things like drinking and we, the people who do it don’t actually realise that it kills.

I think he set the play in the north of England because binge drinking is becoming really common is these areas and if he set it in an other area like France this would look out of place because they don’t drink continuously they might not understand it as well as we would and they wouldn’t see any major point to it. It is also very evident to me especially, that the humour is very British and would be extremely different to portray and transport to non-English speaking audiences. After all, humour is arguably the most important driving force in the play without in my opinion, it would be quite dull.

However, above all, the social context is extremely important. The play is fundamentally English which addresses some very English issues. When Godber started writing the play the government and the citizens of Britain had really started to try and act due to drink. There had actually been many deaths in Britain, which had forced people to look at the problem of drinking in England. The actors should act with enthusiasm and meaning towards the play otherwise the full effect won’t be given to the audience.

I think that this play is aimed at middle-class not just about middle class because as I explained the upper classes behaviour doesn’t lower itself to this criteria but I think the upper class might enjoy it just because of the humour. When the actors change characters they will have to change there body posture, voice and gesture. For example when someone will act as the hair dresser they will need to change voice, posture, and gesture and body movement when they would act as a bouncer. As a hairdresser the actor will have to study a woman’s movement like the way she may walk or the ways she acts and the way talk.

But doing this in a drag form may make the play more effective. But if the roles where swapped a woman playing a mans role I don’t think it will work because it wouldn’t be as funny because she doesn’t have the characteristics like facial hair and a deepen voice. I also think that the set would be an important feature in the play because this could be an important issue. There are so many ways that the director could explore. I personally think that the director should make the audience use there imagination.

By this I mean that the audience should imagine the rest of the set rather than putting curtains in the way to block certain features. However there is a problem when the set changes from a club to the salon there isn’t anything to stop the audience from seeing the set being changed. So the curtain was probably a good idea to have. The style of performance is varied because using 1980’s clothes in a modern setting probably wouldn’t work. So the set would have to be a “down class” bar or club. It also should be full of smoke to give full effect.

I think the stage should have no curtains so that the audience can imagine what the setting would be like. The costumes should be boot leg jeans and polo neck jumpers. The style may vary in the cloth department. I think that the lighting should be dim or low because in a night club it’s usually dark but we could have the dim lighting so that the audience could see what was going on. Again the music should be typical 1980’s pop like A-Ha. This set again changes when it’s moved to the salon or the toilets or a night club at 1 am in the morning.

However, above all, the social context is extremely important. The play is fundamentally English which addresses some very English issues. When Godber started writing the play the government and the citizens of Britain had really started to try and act due to drink. There had actually been many deaths in Britain, which had forced people to look at the problem of drinking in England. However, above all, the social context is extremely important. The play is fundamentally English which addresses some very English issues.

When Godber started writing the play the government and the citizens of Britain had really started to try and act due to drink. There had actually been many deaths in Britain, which had forced people to look at the problem of drinking in England. The way that the play could be acted is fairly straight forward because bouncers only has five characters which means five actors to play the whole cast. The actors act as men and women. The themes that they will have to explore are things like exaggerated realism which basically explains itself.

Exaggerated realism is acting something over the top with meaning. The characters are typed in the class; this could mean that the character is stereotyped. Like a stereotypical German man has blonde hair and little round glasses. But sometimes stereotyping someone or something is wrong because if you dress or look like something doesn’t necessarily mean you are. My example of this would be some one maybe dressed like a gypsy it doesn’t mean that they are. The play also has “Black Humour” is something that is funny but wouldn’t be funny to the person that it has happened to.

An example of this is if a person fell over a banana skin in the street you would laugh but if it happened to your Nan it wouldn’t be funny because its part of your family and someone you care for. The next thing in the play is visual humour is humour that you can physically see on stage. An example of would be bottom where they hit each other with a frying pan but not actually hurting each other. So you could apply this to Bouncers by hitting someone with a pint glass in a club when they are drunk. The last acting theme would be a monologue this is a dramatic soliloquy.

This is where a character will talk to him or herself revealing there a secret to the audience and this is a clue to the audience but the other characters don’t know. Development: In this section I am going to say what I did to develop my roles and the sections from the play. I will do this by giving examples from my class work and the techniques we used to improve Bouncers. I will say what I found out from the workshops that we did in lessons, what we learnt from them and try to create the link from the two. Issues and ideas that you explored during our work on the play:

W have a few issues come up while we were trying to act the play out. Firstly when the boys in our class had to act as the women in the Hairdressers. I personally found a few problems like trying to walk the same as a woman when I did; I either did it over the top or not enough. So in the workshops we had to watch and study a girl’s movement, the way they walked and the way they acted when they walked. We found out the girls tend to walk one foot in front of the other because it’s more ladylike and they don’t have the troubles that men have.

Men walked with there legs side by side and when I tried walking with one foot in front of the other I found it fairly uncomfortable. But doing this as well as trying to keep a woman’s posture and gesture was fairly hard. Another thing did that I found fairly difficult was the scripted piece which our whole class was split up into little groups and had to perform. We had a night to learn them but when w came to perform I knew my lines but found that the rest of the group hadn’t so this made it look a shambles and that we hadn’t tried.

I think this has taught me to focus more on the activity that I am working on and not to expand it and get too far ahead of myself. The ways that you explored the play during your practical work: The ways that we explored our practical work was to take a small bit a time and try to develop it. We would try and use various methods like choreography or freeze frames to try and think of expression and word to fit into the appropriate text. I found this easier than being thrown in at the deep end. When I had to play a woman I found it difficult to change the voice and keep it a higher pitched level.

But doing this in stages made it easier for me. We all practise a scene when the bouncers where in the toilet and they chant “16 pints and vindaloo” we tried to interpret this scene in different ways because first we where going to all act drunk and stager about but we thought that it wouldn’t work. Then we tried one person reading and then the other 3 getting drunk but that didn’t look right so after trail and error we decided to have one person reading and have the other three acting a little bit tipsy and making it as funny as we could. But when we came to act it out our class were doing open theatre.

This is where we act it out twice and the first time we act it out with out stopping so that the audience can see what you have done and the second time is for our improvement. They go over it and say where we can improve. This is quite good when you are not sure on an act they are there to help you improve. I liked when we had to choreograph a fight between Eric and les this took quite a bit of time for us to get perfect but when it was perfect it looked and very real. I learnt from this lesson that if you spend time on something you want to work it will work and successfully. In this we tried to shape our ideas on humour and the audience.

We thought that the audience was the most important thing to base the play around so that they could get a good understanding of what we were trying to put across. Next there was humour simply because with out this the play wouldn’t be that good and easy to understand with out humour. Humour played a part when men had to act as women and the women had to act as men. This was because in a workshop before we acted this out, we tried to teach our opposite sex how walk and move like men. So usually the boys sit in class with there legs open looking confident and it was funny watching a girl try to do this and vice versa.

I think when we acted out a performance we had to look at the scene and see what the characters were like before we placed them a actor because it the characters personality is like the actors personality it is fairly oblivious who they are going to play because the match up and usually do the best job. As I went on to do more and more of the play I found John Godbers meaning for the play because after each night trying to get hammered and not pulling seemed a bit boring but for the actors I think its is quite good to exsaudate drunk fools to emphasise the point.

The activities that we did in the work shop like keeping our posture like a woman’s and choreographing the fight, we always applied to a final piece that we would perform to the class. I found that performing a piece helps you understand the whole plot better because when we first read The bouncer through I found it difficult to understand because of the changing characters and sets but after we acted out a few scenes it was easy to under stand. When acting the play we were trying to bring out the key points of the play and that was by exsaudated realism, we did this by stereotyping.

Then next thing was typing the characters and we did this by looking at the characters personality and comparing it with whoever we had in our group. We did try to add visual humour to our parts by doing something that the audience could physically see an example was when we were acting out the toilet scene and when one of the characters slipped over on the urine on the floor and get his leg wet, went up to the hand dryer to dry himself off.

Overall I felt that the play was mostly well performed because when we did the workshops in the class it helps us learn a lot about:- movement – posture – gesture – voice – confidence I chose these as the main ones because they are the ones that I felt I had improved on the most. I have gain experience on how to walk and move as a woman and didn’t fell embarrassed about it because the rest of the boys had to do it as well. I can now sort of keep my voice like a woman’s voice if I had to. I have learnt that if you work together and or hard it will get done and that forum theatre helped my performance because of people’s useful comments. This also helped my understanding of the play.