Fairytale

Our first scene was born from the idea of looking at remakes of Red Riding hood to educate poeple in the huge numbers of kidnapping's and murders each year. We liked this idea of portraying horrific crime in an exaggerated melodramatic way that was more enjoyable and light hearted for an audience that will also allow us to include physical theatre. 

Being lucky enough to have a 5 hour workshop with Frantic Assembly teaching us a range of lifts, we were adament as a group we wanted to involve these in our piece. We started by writting text portraying Jon and Robert as brave knights who went on a conquest to kill a horrible creature, the over exaggeration of our voices and our movements help make the scene almost child friendly. However the scene ends with the narrator saying "and that concludes the telling of the horrific murder of two year old James Bulger" setting the scene for the rest of the piece. 

We decided to split the scene into two parts, ending the scene with Katie and Rory about to kill Abbie, using a transition we then move to the interrogation scene, the Newspaper scene, the Carosle scene and then back to the fairytale scene where this time instead of holding weapons the boys are holding roses which they drop onto a grave and repeat the quote mentioned before "I killed him, will you tell his mum I'm sorry" to help end the piece on an empathetic tone that leaves the audience to decide for themselves their emotions towards the two boys.  

Carosle

Being inspired from Rory's workshop developing ideas from newspapers and media we decided to include something similar in our final piece. We understand that research and realistic information is important to our piece to make it as powerful as possible to an an audience and help them empathise with the sensitivity of the situation. However we thought it would be interesting to look at the information from the publics point of view. To stick with the theme of our piece (abstract) we decided to portray the information in a Carosle after watching a past Year 12's performance. By standing in a circle, facing forwards towards the audience we take it in turns to play either an interviewer or an interviewee, we ask questions to the mother of Robert Thompson, the physicstrist who worked on the case, the mother of James Bulger 20 years on from the murder and a range of other people. This helped us to teach the audience a wider understanding of opinions on the case through different ages and members of society. It also helped us to become different characters exercising our voices and showing a more diverse range. 

Our main aim from this scene is to help the audience understand information that otherwise they wouldn't necessarily understand. We want them to leave our performance being as educated on the situation as possible to really help show them the extreme violence of the crime. 

The importance of research:

Research now more than ever plays a crucial part in our piece, the amount of knowledge and understanding we have gathered by carefully reading and analysing what we have found on the event has created our piece. Below are some link of work and research we have looked at to help inspire our piece:

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/may/06/monsters-james-bulger-arcola-niklas-radstrom - this allowed us to see the interpretation of the play 'Monsters' from the playwright's point of view.

http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/young/bulger/5.html - the novel allowed us to get most of our quotes to make our piece as realistic as possible.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Monsters-Radstrom-Nikla-NEW-Paperback-1-May-2009-/361078121450?pt=Non_Fiction&hash=item5411eee3ea - a link to the play (available to buy)

Series of links used for verbatim and backgrounds for our scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u9pIf04l2U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm5w7tdTmvM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0OLg7OrLKw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upiTb6ZfJa0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI0FSkEVWOo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfWWKot2qUY

News articles:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/james-bulger-murder-20-years-1594811
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1254971/James-Bulger-Jon-Venables-Robert-Thompson-kidnapping-timeline.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2273769/Jon-Venables-lawyer-recalls-killers-angelic-face-James-Bulgers-brutal-murder.html

Interrigation: PART 2

After learning what we had about the mother's last lesson we knew it was an important character to have, we swapped the attorney for one character who would change their body language to adapt to one of the mums. We then began to script write. We knew from prior results that using verbatim and research would produce the most effective scene so taking lines from both 'Monsters' and the novel we began to re write the scene keeping only the staging. The result shown below was much more heart wrenching and the portrayal of the boys attitudes and behaviour was much more realistic. We also decided to add in a flash back, showing a short scene of Robert persuading Jon to throw a brick at the "baby" as Robert was named the more "manipulative" of the two. After we'd added a sound scape to the scene with a nursery rhyme, and the screaming of James we were happy with the scene.

The sensitive portrayal of the story is the most important factor of our piece. As a group we wish to educate the audience of the horrific event and to tell it with the up most respect we possibly can as we understand that Robert, Jon and James were all children, friends and family to someone.

Interrogation

After realising that we were lucky enough o have a Frantic Assembly workshop in less than 2 weeks we left the Fairy-tale scene and moved onto the next one. This is where the research really played it's part. After looking at our last interrogation scene we realised how much of an importance staging is and we decided to lay it out by using stools. We started with the Detective, Jon and Robert, and an attorney for the both of them. We asked questions such as "How often do you attend school" and when Robert didn't answer to get the attorney to reveal the details to try and engage the audience with the boy's personality. However looking back on this scene we realised it was flat and the reason this was, was because it lacked revealing information to shock the audience much like we had been shocked when looking at verbatim.

Therefore we went away and researched further. This lead to the finding of the novel: which revealed so many detailing's about the murder and the interrogation process that we were able to create a much more realistic scene. Learning that until Jon's mother reassured Jon she would love him no matter what he refused to reveal any information and that in the end it was Jon that admitted the murder "I killed him. What about his mum will you tell her I'm sorry." Throughout the whole novel you understand the importance of the mothers and we decided instead of an attorney this was an important character we needed to work in.

"After more hours of Robert's denials and eventual admissions, his mother Ann tells her son that it will be easier if he just tells the truth. Robert has been sobbing.
Robert Thompson:Jon threw a brick in his face.
Ann Thompson: Why?
Robert Thompson: I don't know.
Detective Roberts: Right, try to think. Right, let's see what we've got, we're getting there, aren't we? We're getting to the truth now.
Robert Thompson: Yeah, well, I'm going to end up getting all the blame 'cause I've got blood on me.
Robert goes on to describe Jon in an out-of-control killing frenzy. He claimed Jon threw more bricks at the baby, and then hit him with a "big metal thing with holes in it." Then Jon hit James with a stick. James was lying there, still, eyes open, across the tracks. Jon had the batteries and threw one of them at James's face. All the time Robert said he was trying to pull Jon away, screaming at him to stop.
Astounded, the detectives asked, "Why did Jon do all this?" Robert didn't know. "I only pinched," he said. When investigators tell Robert they think he hit James too, he replied, "Well, that's what you think"


The link to the novel can be found below:

http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/young/bulger/1.html

The Idea

After looking at 'Monsters' last lesson it was clear to the group that the play had sparked the most interest out of the workshops we had looked at. We decided to research for the event for verbatim, news articles, interviews, book articles and anything else we could find to broaden our knowledge on an event that happened before any of us were born. The information we turned up was shocking but also engrossing and interesting in the same way.

As a group we decided it would be interesting to look at the idea of starting our piece with a Fairy-tale scene that would confuse and sugar coat the event. We wanted to retell the event using Knight's and Witches, to make the 10 year old boys seem as if they were saving "a far away village" and then at the end of the scene drop upon them the fact they had just watched a retelling of the brutal murder of 2 year old James Bugler.

We started by playing the roles of narrators writing a script that without too much context would be suitable and funny for an audience of 6 year olds, but due to the deeper underlying narrative would have a much more shocking event on the audience. (The finished narration can be seen to the side.)

We decided we wanted the scene to be told with elements of physical theatre to make the violence stand out more and therefore make the Knights seem more 'noble' and 'brave. However when it came to actioning this we had many problems as our knowledge of physical theatre wasn't very extensive.

Workshop 4: 'Monsters'

Workshop 4: Workshop 4 was ran by Abbie and saw us looking at the start of the play 'Monsters' written by Niklas Rådström, a Swedish lady. The play follows the horrific event in 1993when Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, both 10, abducted two-year-old James Bulger from a Merseyside shopping centre, took him on a circuitous walk to a railway cutting and murdered him.
The play is performed by four adult actors who take multiple roles - as children, as parents, as investigators and as a chorus. With its emotive name and subject matter, Monsters might seem to be simply fuelling the tabloid hysteria that surrounds cases such as Bulger's death.
It immediately struck as a group as something we wanted to look further into, the retake of such a shocking event struck so many ideas in our head and we began to brainstorm idea's of we could remodel such a fantastic play and make it our own. We looked at the scene following the denial of 36 bystanders and began to action using "lanes" something we had looked at before in drama. It was interesting to see how such an abstract play revealed so much information and we set a homework to go away and research more thoroughly on the event.


"I thought long and hard," says Rådström. "I thought for five or six years. There is no new information in the play; everything is on public record. If the media can give it miles of column inches, why shouldn't theatre deal with it? But I was cautious: if you deal with such a thing, then you must do it responsibly - although I'm not sure the British courts or the tabloids dealt with it in a responsible way." He is referring to the fact that Venables and Thompson were tried in an adult court. "With every word I wrote, I tried to imagine how it might be if the parents of James Bulger, or the parents of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, were in the audience. Theatre is unique in the way that it brings artists and audiences together in a room and enables them to have a conversation."