Creative Log

Stage 1
In the beginning of this project we began by looking at different practitioners; Brecht, Berkoff, Artaud. We at what their style was, how they used set and lighting, what influenced them and what themes they portrayed.

We then began by looking at the different scripts we could choose and we began by ruling out which of the ones we didn’t like. During this time we would read little extracts of these texts to get an idea of the ones we liked.

After fully ruling out the ones we all didn’t like we began to discuss which practitioner could go with which text. After discussing this we choose the idea we liked best and split into our groups.

My group choose “A Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night Time”

The group was comprised of me,

Alex Evans,

And Dominic Hodsdon

Stage 2

We choose the practitioner of Artaud as we all had a common interest in his style; the theatre of fear. We also felt the first original 20 pages could easily be changed to interpret Artaud’s themes.

We went through a few different drafts before we felt we had changed enough. From here I will refer to two different drafts; Draft 1 and Draft 2.

The first serious draft we had turned into a complete failure. All we had done was add a small introductory scene, cut lines and added a few effects by using sound and lighting.

The second draft was the one we finally went with. This first began after one of our rehearsals completely failed.

In the first creations stages of the second draft we completely scrapped all previous ideas and we began from scratch. The premise of the ideas came from the idea that we would run through different scenes from the script but change a few different factors, we would then re-run these scenes however we would further develop the changes.

My contribution comes in the form that I came up with the idea of using the nursery Rhyme "How Much is that Doggy" during the performance

The original story follows the character of Christopher as he is framed for murdering his neighbour’s dog. Christopher then begins his investigation to clear his name and find out who actually killed the dog.

To make this into the style of Artaud we began to change a few factors of the original story. We first changed the idea that I was Christopher that actually killed the dog. However it wasn’t the dog it was actually Mr Shears. Our script then follows Christopher as he meets the police officer, the convict number 40 and his farther. Then on our re-run we would further develop this factor to it wasn’t a dog he killed it was himself that he killed.

When making this script we hadn’t had the need to create any new characters. However we had to completely change the concepts of some characters. The Character of Christopher now became insane, this was to reflect one of Artaud's themes. Siobhan in the original story had a strange role; she is Christopher’s teacher but acts like a narrator to the story. We changed this so she was just the narrator to the story. Mrs Shears became Mr Shears for convenience for costume. The police officer became an abusive cop. Number 40 was an unnamed character in the original script; however we felt we could do something sinister to him, so we made him become a paedophile. Ed also became an abusive Parent and finally Reverent Peters stayed the same. We added two minor parts to ghost and echo Christopher, these were voice 1 and 2, these would symbolise his depression weighing him down and controlling him.

Artaud’s use of costume was very minimalist; he usually had his actors in all black or in block colours. We decided for all of our costumes it would be black trousers and a white T-shirt for all characters, this would allow the lighting to affect the colour of our clothing.

Makeup was another thing Artaud used very sparingly, he would use it to accentuate facial features and add darker eyes. For our make-up we did exactly that, white face with dark rings around the eyes.

One of Artaud’s main features is making the audience feel uncomfortable, so we decided that the best layout for our staging would incorporate the use of Promenade as to make the audience move around, this would also make it much easier to interact with them.

For the actual set we divide the room up into 9 equal sections. In section 1 there would be a Desk angled to face inwards to the centre of the room. Section 2, 3, 4 and 6 were left empty, section 5 had a cage in the centre, above it there was a plush dog suspended with rope. In the cage there was a bone, and tied to the cage was leashes for the audience to be tied to. In section 7 there was a frame where we tied piping to create a jail-cell-like setting. Section 8 had a coffin in which we filled with dirt. Finally I section 9 we had another desk facing inwards.

Artaud’s lighting mainly featured colours like red and green to show death and white blinding lights to disorientate the audience, so we used red lighting to give the set a more sinister feel.

Our script features a lot of use of recordings to add different effects like a dog whimpering. We also used recordings to have dialogue with characters that were otherwise unavailable to speak at that time

Finally we had a dress rehearsal, for this we gathered a small audience of 4 students and preformed it to them to get an idea of the overall pacing and to get a general idea of the audience’s reactions.