Today we moved onto my Greek Theatre play. Beforehand, I chose an extract from, "The Frogs," by Aristophanes but after attempting to alter it so that it appeals to a modern day audience, I felt that a play like The Frogs is very hard to modernise as it would either be totally different or it lose it's original plot.
Following this decision, I searched for a new play and came across, "The Cyclops," by Euripides. This play featured a lot more movement than the other play so I thought it would be a good idea to convert it to a physical theatre piece. I decided that I would remove all dialogue from the entire piece (minus the Chorus speaking parts) and we'd mime what our lines were saying. For example, Odysseus has the line, "Look- a cave!" so the actor reprising his role (Tom) would probably point to the cave and beckon the other soldiers over with hand gestures.
During this lesson however, we spent some time designing our masks for our characters. There would be 3 different mask designs; one for Cyclops (Ashley), one for Odysseus (Tom) and one for the soldiers (Dan, Toby, Lorna and I). I feel that the soldiers would all have the same mask, as soldiers are very uniform and everyone would look the same. Odysseus would have a very similar mask to the soldiers as he is a soldier too but he would have something which distinguishes himself from the other soldiers. Cyclops' mask would feature gross nose, one bloodshot eye and horrible teeth.
Next lesson, I'll start getting people on their feet and I'll devise what will happen in the scene.
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