Session 2: How to take an audience back in time to 1918
The period setting of Four Families of the Fallen is a crucial element of our performance and the experience that we’re looking to give to our audiences.
In a traditional theatre, the audience understands what period a story is set through the set design, props and costumes, along with any music or sound effects. All of these elements combine to provide a sensory backdrop that helps anchor the performance to a specific year and injects realism into the performance.
Getting to know 1918 Because Four Families won’t be performed in a traditional theatre, we must therefore develop other ways to transport the audience back in time with us, without compromising the story with excessive exposition or over relying on our costumes.
For our second devising session, we wanted to explore what verbal and non-verbal elements of a performance we needed to include in Four Families of the Fallen to maintain realism and keep our audiences connected with 1918. By spending time on this now, we would produce a list of actions, behaviours and phrases, which we can then apply to each of our four scenes once we have devised our four stories and before we finalise the scripts. 2018 vs. 1918 To truly bring to life the characters of Four Families in a 1918 setting, cast members will need to understand the elements of their physicality, language and the political, social and technological references that are different today compared to 100 years ago. We began this process with a short improvisation exercise, that was designed to help us identify the types of behaviours and language elements we will need to change to convey 1918. Using a few lines of neutral dialogue, actors were split into four groups and tasked with developing a short contemporary scene; the sort of scene that could slot right in to an episode of EastEnders or similar soap opera.
Afterwards, we critiqued each of the improvisations to determine whether they achieved a contemporary feel, and, more importantly, identify what it was about each scene that conveyed its contemporary setting.
Together we then identified a number of ways to successfully portray a specific historical era, which will inform our devising process and avoid unnecessary use of exposition.
Key findings: 1. We identified the following ways to convey a time period:
• Agency and freedom of choice (movement and inferred movement in language) • Characters’ status • Formality of language • References to technology and communications • References to brands
2. To be most effective, these approaches should be used sparingly and subtly.
Victorian values We know from our characters’ backstories, which are our stimulus text, that many of the people we're portraying were raised during Victorian times and therefore we can incorporate many of the well-documented principles of Victorian etiquette, how the people in our plays interact.
