Final project

For our final performance of the year, we have been working on the screenplay Last Summer by Heather Speake which we have turned into a play. At first the whole class sat in a circle with Heather and we began to read the screenplay, we each took turns to be a different character and speak the lines. This was a great thing for us because we had the advantage to ask Heather questions about why she wrote what she wrote and to tell us about the characters in the play whereas Pronoun didn’t have the advantage to meet their play write. One of the questions that was asked in the circle was “Did you create the character of Maisie to be yourself?” Heather kindly answered by telling us she didn’t and who Maisie actually is. The screenplay Last Summer’s main topic is FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) and Heather spoke to us about why she decided to base the screenplay on FGM and she explained what it is, some of us knew what it already meant and others were quite shocked and grossed out. FGM is a big topic to explore because it happens in many countries such as Egypt, Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia etc.

Although we couldn’t search online for information about Last Summer because it’s not a published play, it’s just a first draft that Heather has written; we looked at the main themes the play explored which were FGM, cancer and homosexuality in a religion.

In order for the class to understand more about FGM, we had an hour’s workshop with a woman who came into college just to speak to us about it and to give awareness. During that workshop, the process of FGM was explained and the reason why FGM happens, I learned that FGM is carried out for cultural and religious reasons within families and communities. For example, it is considered a necessary part of raising a young teenage girl to prepare her for adulthood and marriage. People believe it makes you pure and a real woman but all it does is make you really ill. I think having this workshop really helped me with understanding my character more and why she wanted to do everything she could to help her best friend, Sareeya and prevent her mother sending her younger sister to get circumcised.  

For my own knowledge, I researched what some of the symptoms are for brain tumour to understand what Maisie was going through towards the end of the play. I found out that Tonic-Clonic is the loss of control of body functions in this case, Maisie tells her mother that her left leg hurts and it feels numb and weak. This is the first sign that we hear about her cancer spreading. In addition, being homosexual and being Muslim is forbidden in Islam and that it’s going against Allah. At the beginning of the play, Maisie finds Jas asleep on the wasteland alone with a black eye but he doesn’t tell her why he has a black eye then later on when Jas accidentally spills out that he is gay, he explains that his brother and cousin, Bash and Omar beat him up because he told them he was gay.

As a group we didn’t do warmups before we started rehearsing because we were so into starting straight away so we could finish earlier as some of us sometimes needed to leave early or were really tired and had no energy to carry on especially because we’d stay until around 5pm every day just so we could rehearse. However, every Friday morning with Rob we would come into class, stand in a circle and repeat a dance move for 10 seconds for the class to copy and we’d all go down the line. This was a great warm up because it got all our bodies loose and awake so we were ready to be fully energised for rehearsals. Moreover, as a class we would do tongue twisters to help with articulating words so the audience can understand us clearly. In addition, we were all so dedicated to perform a perfect performance and be 100% ready on the day, we all gave up our day off to come in and rehearse every week until the performance.

During rehearsals at first we just read through our lines before deciding on how we were going to set the stage. We thought if we read through it we would be more comfortable with the script and if necessary cut lines out or add lines in. As Jireh was our assistant director, I thought that with his help we got a lot done in rehearsals, although Rob wasn’t there to direct at the start because he was busy with directing and helping the Year 2 Level 2 drama class, we managed to do a lot and then show Rob at times when he was available. When we got our scripts we were told we have until around the end of May to learn all our lines in time for our performance which then was about 5-6 weeks away until Rob announced that we would be performing earlier than the end of May. We were all upset with the late announcement because at that time we had less than 3 weeks to learn our lines, discuss costume and props, and think about how we were going to stage it, and do technical run-throughs in the theatre as we only had a day to do a whole technical run-through . However, we all managed to work really hard and get everything done by then.

At the first rehearsal with the script we were all unfamiliar with the lines and the stage directions so we decided to go through scene by scene and be clear with the stage directions between lines or during line reading. If the stage direction didn’t seem right or the line wasn’t necessary to be said we would all tell our ideas to Jireh and he would confirm with Rob to change a line or erase it. For example, one of the stage directions we agreed to add in was in Scene 1 where Jas sees a spider crawling along his arm was that I run over to cup the spider into my hand and place it onto the floor whilst saying the lines “It’s a distinguished jumping spider. They’re endangered. There’s only about two-thousand…”

At one point during one of the rehearsals, we all sat down at the table with our scripts and a pencil and started going through the script from the beginning. From page to page we discussed as a group which lines to cut out, add in or leave the same. Heather kindly told us that she was more than happy for us to change lines from the script to suit ourselves which was nice of her to allow us to do. We were annotating beside lines and adding an action or an objective for the character so it would be easier to remember rather than trying to remember it and forgetting it after. I think that my character comes across many objectives in the play however Maisie’s main objective was to help Sareeya stop her mother from sending Jamilah off to her aunts. The reason why I think that’s her main objective is because Maisie runs home to get help from her father and begs him to help stop Sareeya’s mum even though he declines to help and tells her not to interfere, her stubbornness helps her get what she wants and her mother decides to stand up for herself and help her daughter. She also runs over to tell Jas about Sareeya so he can help her too but then she sees he’s in a drunken state so she takes him to her house to sober up and be taken care of by her parents. 

One of the words we changed to suit the character of Grandma who we changed to Grandad because the character was being played by a male, Peter. We agreed to change the word ‘darling’ to ‘Maisie’ because we thought that the word ‘darling’ is not a word that would suit Grandad and that he isn’t someone who would overuse the word. Moreover, we changed the original line “Thank you, Grandma. Can I look through your mum’s suitcase and choose that dress today?” to “Thank you, Grandad. Can I look through the other stuff in the attic and choose that dress today?”. The reason we changed this line is because it didn’t make sense as there was no longer a Grandma because we changed it to Grandad and it would suit the situation more if we didn’t mention “mum’s suitcase” because that refers to the Grandma’s mother, in this case we made it as if Grandma had died a while ago and Maisie only has a Grandad from her dad’s side. In the play, we are not aware of any grandparents from her mother’s side because Heather didn’t mention any of that. I think sitting together as a group and working together on the script worked really well, there were no arguments over lines and stage directions which I was very pleased about. We all seemed to agree on the same things to make the play more suitable for us and easier.

 Being the character Maisie and seeing the amount of lines I had in every scene felt like a mouthful, although I didn’t mind learning all those lines but at the time we didn’t have much time until the performance so I don’t think I would’ve been able to learn everything in less than 2 weeks. As a group we decided to cut most of Maisie’s lines that were unnecessary. This really helped me learn my lines easier and in time before the performance. Jireh had the idea of merging scene 10 and 11 together so that we wouldn’t have to keep changing over scenes. We decided to add scene 11 between when Bash takes Jas to a night-club hoping he would be straight again to Sareeya calling Maisie explaining to her that her mother is going to take her little sister to her aunt to Omar meeting up with Bash and Jas at the club miming over the song Blurred lines by Robin Thicke.

In order for my class and myself to understand Maisie better, I was practised being hot-seated as the character of Maisie. In one of Sharron’s lessons we were all split up into two groups with the people in our play and we wrote down questions to ask each other. A few of the questions I was asked were:

What is your favourite food?

Ooh well, I really do love spaghetti Bolognese but I liked the special recipe my mum makes which is sooo delicious. She doesn’t tell me what it’s called or how she makes it when I ask her because she says that it’s a secret for a reason.

Are you as religious as your father?

To be honest, I sometimes don’t even believe that there is a God out there. Jas calls me crazy and tells me I shouldn’t say that but I don’t really care. If it wasn’t for my religious Christian vicar of a father I would probably be an Atheist.

Can you describe yourself in 3 words?

Caring. Adventurous. Independent.

One of the main scenes we focused on during rehearsals was scene 9 which was the longest scene out of all the others. Scene 9 takes over many hours for example it starts with Maisie, Jas and Sareeya at the wastle land in the evening and then they take goes puffing on a spliff and time goes by and they’re stoned staring up at the stars sometime around midnight. In order to make it believable that I was stoned, I worked on changing the tone of my voice by making it quite slow and high pitched to show I’m not thinking straight to be speaking properly. For example, the words “It’s amazing” I thought about exaggerating it a bit and stretching out the word ‘amazing’.  This will help the audience understand how crazy I sound. In addition, when Maisie and Jas begin to talk about God, Maisie gets up and walks in front of Jas and looks up at the sky telling God to strike her down because she don’t believe him. I tried making a point to the audience that I’ve got no control over what I’m doing or saying. For a character whose father is a Vicar and family is very religious, for someone to say they don’t believe in God sounds quite crazy so I had the idea of playing Maisie as if she was psycho and just babbling about weird stuff that she probably doesn’t even mean. The action I used was swaying up and down and losing my balance at times to reveal that in my mind the world is spinning around and I clearly can’t stand still.