"Freedom to think, freedom to act, the rule of law, intellectual development, equality of opportunity, eradication of corruption, a free market, freedom to worship freedom to express your opinion if it does not inhibit other opinions, equality of men, equality of women, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, the separation of church and state, the ability of every citizen to vote in free and fair elections to decide their own government, these thing's don't come free, these things have to be earned with war and blood, it's the only price. They said my sister was killed by the blast as the plane hit the building, they think she died quickly and I don't know I won't ever know for sure about that, but what I do know is that the man who ordered my sisters death did not want anything I could give him. I know that he was, according to the criteria I've laid out for you the enemy. He was the enemy of everything that allows you to do your job and everything that keeps you safe and gives you life. He ordered the attack as a retaliation, yes, but not against the bombs or bullets but against music, and movies and sports and life. And my sister loves those things. I didn't kill him because he killed my sister, I didn't kill him because of the country he came from or what he believed, I killed him because I know what the enemy looks like and it had his face."The play was interesting when working on verbatim because the whole play used last phone calls, letters, witness reports, accounts from loved ones, of the events of 9/11, making it more realistic. As a group of 5 we read through the monologue and decided on lines that we thought we're important and then each took a line. We brainstormed several ideas, including re-creating a scene from inside and outside the building in a split screen fashion, we played with the idea of creating a bomb using physical theatre and then focused on terrorism and stereotypes, this linked us to the London bombings, something closer to home for all of us, and the idea that for the months after this people were very wary of people expressing their religion, or wearing rucksacks.
We decided to go with the judgement of people wearing rucksacks and set it on a tube, we each took different characters, I played a child with my mother to show how children can be so easily influenced by their parents opinions, a business man, and a commuter. We decided to use the practioner Artaud and involve the audience. Because it was on the tube we created spare seats that we we're going to push the audience into to create the busy hustle and bustle of a morning commuter train. At the "next stop" Rory entered the train, playing the victim, wearing a rucksack. As he entered the carriage we immediately spun our attention to him and moved towards him saying "I know that the enemy looks like and it had his face" we choose this line because it's extremely powerful and helped to excel the sterotypes further, we repeated this line 3 times until Rory removed his bag, the we returned to our starting postions and repeated a line about freedom (mine is highlighted above) to convince the victim he was free to express in any way he wanted. When Rory put the bag back on we repeated the process twice, until the final time where we gathered round Rory to hide his body from the audience a made a shooting noise to represent the fact that either we killed him, or he eventually killed himself. We immediately turn around and add the extra words "I killed him" to add more intensive intensive power and return back to our seats, at the next stop Jack steps on wearing a rucksack and we turn our attention to him as if to signify that the whole process will continue to repeat itself and then the scene ends.
I was particularly proud of the way we worked together as a group and produced this piece of work, I think it linked well to the stimulus we were given, it represented conflict, inner and global and is defiantly something I would use in my final piece.
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