April 15, 2017

Throughout this process, I have always had a personal ideology of failure. This can be attributed to a large array of things, including personal and theoretical, but all of them have come together to create a distaste for ‘perfect’ theatre.

As mentioned previously, I have always wanted to avoid this theatre company being a cliché and for us not to present a glorified version of the world or the issue we are dealing with. This may be viewed as pessimistic but I rarely agree or enjoy theatre that presents a golden version of an issue, simply to attract audience or be nice. To me, this is not staying true to a theatre company’s storytelling role. Plus, I don’t think it presents a fair or honest view of reality. ‘Failure challenges the cultural dominance of instrumental rationality and the fictions of continuity that bind the way we imagine and manufacture the world.’ (Bailes, 2011, 02) shows how this representation of failure, especially within western theatre, can be a powerful tool. I know that therefore I like failure within theatre, it represents the truth about the world and doesn’t add to the imaginative stability of this world.

I think this also links to the type of comedy that naturally came from the development process, with it instantly taking a darker, more sadistic tone, especially more tongue in cheek. A quote I kept coming back to, when writing the script especially, was Freudian view on laughter and how he ‘saw humour as frequently harbouring our aggression towards forces, institutions and individuals that hold power over us.’ (Gray, 2009, 10), which works perfectly with this sense that we wanted to show the unknown everyday story, that is often lost in the sea of big news stories.

This meant that I always wanted the characters to ‘fail’, in some way or other. The character may have succeeded or learnt from their experience but in all cases, they needed to ‘fail’ or return to the position they were in the beginning. I believe that this shows a true representation of the world, especially when it came to escapism. A huge part of escapism is that you don’t actually deal with the issue, but just avoid it…so why should our show be any different.

End of Childhood (O’Donnell, 2017)

The one character that I think this was presented through most was Laura. Throughout the creation process of her, we always had the aim for her to fail. Yes, she may have escaped into her childhood fantasy but she was always going to be dragged back to her harsh reality. This is shown in the line that ends her scene, showing that her fairy tale was a lie all along and was destined to fail, unlike a fairy tale usually does. Of course, this was seen throughout all the characters, but Laura’s was the harshest to deal with. Thus, achieving the effect of failure that I wanted in this play and presenting a real view of the world, something Fragment wanted to do.

Works Cited

O’Donnell, S. (2017) Fragment Theatre Company’s Tech and Dress Run.

Bailes, Sara Jane. (2011) Performance Theatre And The Poetics Of Failure. 1st ed. London: New York, 2011. Print.

Gray, Jonathan. (2009) Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era. 1st ed. London: 2011. Print.

The use of costuming is often overlooked as an element within theatre and has been purely regarded as an added embellishment to the stage. However ‘we can consider the power of costuming to shape identity’ (Monks, 2009, 3), which proves an important aspect in the creation of characters within a show, offering the audience a greater insight into who that character is.

At this point in our process, we wanted each character to have a clear costume to display that person’s personality and to make it obvious that the focus of the show was now targeted on this particular character. Our show is centred around the key prop which is named as ‘The Wheel of Escapism’, which ultimately decides the structure of the show by randomly selecting which section will be performed at what time. Each section of the wheel had a different theme and a different colour, for example the food section would be a purple segment with the word ‘food’ written on it. This prop influenced each characters costume vastly, as the colours of each characters outfits had to compliment the colour of each section. This was to enhance the idea of the game show aesthetic we were looking into using as it implies that each character can be seen as a team competing to win this escapism game show.

The end result of the costume/prop ‘The Wheel of Escapism’ (Odonnell, 2017)

An initial sketch of ‘The Wheel of Escapism’ (Goddard,, 2017)

The logo for ‘The Wheel of Escapism’ (Odonnell, 2017)

Each characters costume symbolised their way of escaping through the assigned colours. For example, the character of Laura escapes through childhood games, such as building a fort in her run down adult flat to avoid her adult responsibility of being in debt. Hence Laura’s costume would be something that she would wear whilst relaxing at home, e.g. a dressing gown.

There’s a heavy use of colour applied to each characters costume apart from the two hosts character that were recently created. This was because the host characters were in charge of this world and held the power over the other characters, therefore the difference between them and the other characters needed to be apparent. To portray this, they were dressed in formal suits to signify their importance and their passive colours of black and white helped to emphasise the fact that they were not participating in the game show.

Final costumes

Sketches of the costumes for each character

(Goddard, 2017)

Works Cited:

Goddard, C. (2017)

Monks, A. (2009) The actor in costume. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillian, United Kingdom.

Odonnell, S. (2017) Fragment Theatre Company. Lincoln: SO Photography.

Day: April 15, 2017

‘I’m a deeper shade of blue, And there’s nothing I can do’ (Steps, 1998)

More Than Just a Costume?