The Play ”Oedipus”

Over the last few weeks we have been studying the two scripts, Valerie and Oedipus. We used some of the explorative strategies to help us understand and develop the plays.

Oedipus is a Greek play. In Greece they perform plays in an Amphitheatre which has a lot of people that’s why they use coral speech so that everyone in the audience can hear them. Oedipus was an unusual play compared to Valerie because I found Valerie easy to understand. Valerie is a play about a woman that has been mistreated by her husband. Oedipus is a Greek play about a bad prophecy that’s going to happen if they don’t kill Oedipus, he will kill his father and marry his mother so they decide to kill their son, but everything started going wrong. I found it confusing and the type of language they spoke in was difficult to remember, where as Valerie we could make up our own lines.

Valerie is a kitchen sink drama, Kitchen sink realism was an English cultural movement which developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays. It is a very emotional play where as Oedipus is a very strong play.

For the play ‘Oedipus’, I used four explorative strategies, I used Narration and Role-play. Narration is when someone comes and tells the audience what’s happening on stage. This can be done by one or more actors, or by a “narrator”, someone who is not in the drama. In my play narration was used to show and set the scenes also to speed up the drama. If I was the narrator I would use narration to communicate with the audience, so they know exactly what’s happening. By using narration it enhances my understanding because then I know exactly what’s happening and it makes me understand the play more deeply.

I also applied “Role-play”, Role-play is when an actor puts themselves in someone else’s shoes and acts out that characteristics. I used role play for most of my drama plays. My role play in this play starts of with me being a servant and to adapt to that role; I walked round the stage with my head bowed down. I also repeated some of the words the actors said so that the audience will know their important. Also I took on another role in the play. I was the great Sphinx and to suit that role, I had to act out the characteristics. I had to make my body language high and mighty; I also used my facial impressions to show this. I made my voice loud and strong to make me sound powerful. I find role play very useful because it helps me adapt to different characteristics quickly. We also used marking the moment; marking the moment is when you pick a specific part of the play and mark it by using slow motion and music. For our scene we used slow motion because we felt it was appropriate.

For “Valerie” we used lots of explorative strategies one of them was hot seating. Hot seating is when an actor is asked various questions about their character by the audience. By using this strategy I found out a lot about the person I am playing, also by applying this strategy it helped me understand the roles of the other characters. We also used still images, still images is an explorative strategy. It is when you create a scene using your facial expression and body language, we use still image to show when Valerie and Lee got married. We used proximix to show the relationship between the actors. By using still image it helps the audience understand what’s happening. Basically, in all our scenes we used Narration. Narration is a spoken speech which accompanies what happens on stage. We use narration, so that the audience can understand what’s happening. It also engages the audience into the play.

We use narration for one of the scenes which was the “Scrap Book” scene. By using narration on this scene the audience knows where the scene is taking place and what’s happening. We also used Cross Cutting; we used it throughout the whole play. Cross Cutting is when you rearrange the scenes in a different order and then act it out. We use this strategy to create an effect which makes the audience focus more. In our play we start of by showing the present then to the past and then the future. The last explorative strategy we used was forum theatre we sue it to help us improve our performance. Forum theatre is when we act out a scene and it is watched by the audience. At any point in drama, the audience can stop the play and make a suggestion to improve the play. By using this strategy it really improved our play, we added more strategies into our scenes that were offered by the audience. In one of the scenes we added thought tracking. Thought Tracking is when an actor steps forward and tells the audience what they are feeling inside. Also in some of the scenes we changed the way we act I think by using forum theatre it really improved the play, and it is a useful explorative strategy.

Overall I liked studying both types of drama but I preferred ‘Valerie’ because I didn’t have to learn a script so I wasn’t worried about forgetting my lines, I can just improvise, and also you can have the freedom of how you act according to your character. Also the Greek play was too hard to understand so I couldn’t put more efforts in and also you can’t show your emotions clearly. I found ‘Valerie easy to understand and to act out and also the explorative strategies helped me improve my performance. I also think that the audience enjoyed it too. Also because we used more explorative strategies in Valerie we could understand the play and our characters well.