SWED Q1

My stimulus is about a group of friends who are all a part of the art industry and striving to be recognised and what happens when one of them becomes famous and how it effects the other friends and their feelings towards her fame and success.  Jealousy plays a large part in the story as it is the jealousy of her friends which cause them to make art out her recovery but also what leads them to hate her as they are jealous of her, her fame and money but also because they feel as if she left them behind because she became famous and essentially ridiculed them and their work in the 'bohemian quarter'. When editing the scrips we kept in mind the theme of jealousy and had this widely explored in the play whilst also portraying the theme of hatred towards their successful friend as much of their jealousy is portrayed through the hatred of their friend. The story, we believe is set in London during the 90's which led us to researching British art and the characters also take drugs so we researched the effects of drugs on the body including drugs of marijuana, cocaine, and speed which were popular drugs during this century which helped us to characterise our characters during certain parts of the play. My initial reaction to the play was that it was very interesting and our devising process would be very physical. Throughout the play there are no line assignments as the entire play is essentially a monologue with no stage directions at all which meant that we could experiment and basically do anything we wanted with the play. However, this would also make it more difficult to devise as we have nothing to inspire us a part from the line and the content of the lines, this also meant that we had to use out own interpretations to create things like movement sequences and maybe the death of a character. We felt as a group that the scene where she jumps into the empty swimming pool would be an interesting scene to work on, it's also a significant scene within the play so we decided to devise that scene before anything else.