Final Evaluation

Our first performance was to the rest of the strand. I felt that this performance went well as the audience were really engaged and we had a lot of laughs. During this performance the group's energy was high and everyone was putting their all into it. It went very smoothly but I felt my monologue could have been angrier and sexier, I also thought that our transitions could have been smoother. People commented afterwards on how Brechtian our performance was, with our songs, name badges and how we alienated the audience. People said that my performance was interesting as they felt I managed to get the message across clearly. Overall in this performance I felt we managed to put on a Brechtian show, get our message across and make the audience think. Our final performance to our friends and family was very different to that of our strand as the audience was very different in ages and humour. At the beginning of our piece we had music so we could collect our name badges, but the music system was not working so we did it without. This did not affect the performance much but it did, for me personally, throw me off a bit. Another thing that threw us off was the fact that the audience did not laugh as much as our strand did. But we all kept in mind that this audience was completely different and that each audience has different senses of humour. We all gave it our all and our energies were high throughout the performance. I felt our Bush piece went a lot smoother and the transitions between the different scenes and sections were a lot smoother. I felt that my performance was a lot better as I put my all into it and I finally felt as if I understood Blondie and what she was saying. For example when I said "I also believe in the ever active urge of humanity and in truth" I feel strongly about this and so was able to put truth into my words. Overall I enjoyed our final performance as the whole groups energy was high, everyone put everything they had into it and we got our message across. I felt this as afterwards all the people I talked to said how they realised some things about themselves and how they judge others.

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I felt that James stood out from the rest of us as he really got into his character of Thatcher. He was very successful in Gestus as he made all of his roles stereotypical and each character had clear gestures put with them. He also made his performance funny yet interesting and intriguing at the same time, which I feel is difficult to do. I feel as if he could have developed his role in the Blondie scenes more. He could have changed the pitch and tone of his voice more and maybe thought about the role of an interviewer. Overall his performance was very memorable. We used lots of Brechtian techniques in our performance. The one we used the most was alienation. We used things like song: Blondie's Call Me (Vote Me) and Hotsteppa. This was Brechtian as using song and dance alienates the audience. We used labels which is a very Brechtian technique as it makes the audience disassociate with the characters and stops them from feeling any emotional connection to them.

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I have learnt that Political Theatre is all about strong messages and putting across a clear and memorable message. You need to be able to understand what you are saying and you should be able to put some of your own views or emotions into your performance. I have also learnt that not all Political Theatre needs to be serious, it can be funny and light hearted yet still thought provoking. I have really enjoyed working on Political Theatre as it is not a genre of theatre I have heard much about before. I really enjoyed working out the political messages and discovering how I feel about events and situations in the world. I think that all theatre is political. As good theatre always has messages behind them, even if they aren't obvious political themed messages they still get people thinking and questioning things. If theatre does not have a message behind it, it seems slightly pointless, as you don't come out of the theatre changed. Theatre is a thought provoking art form as it can challenges people to think about things differently and see things in a different light. This is why I love theatre.