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Stephen Berkoff's The Things I Know To Be True

Decent Essays

4) How did the work of established and recognised theatre practitioners, and/or the work of live theatre, influence the way in which your devised response developed?

The most prominent influence on our production were Frantic Assembly, whose 2015 play The Things I Know To Be True provided a groundwork for our production. The play handles serious issues in a realistic but also very gentle way; showing shades of light in a dark world. It also uses movement as an extension of acting, an idea we drew upon several times.
The first element of this production which influenced our piece was in terms of structure. Within both our play and Frantic’s a phone call is used as the opening scene. A character hears upsetting news but the audience do not; they only see the character reacting. Later on, the phone call happens again and the information is revealed. Rearranging scenes in this way (so a dramatic scene precedes the setting of the story) created a hook for the audience. This intensified the second phone call, as the audience knew what Sierra’s mum was about to find out. It made the …show more content…

In this piece Berkoff decided to use frames as the sole piece of set; one for each member of the ensemble. We also used frames, again one for each member of the ensemble, alongside other pieces of set. These came into their own in the second half of the play. For example, in the final scene we created a courtroom using just frames, and built this on stage during Sierra’s speech. We felt that this was a compelling use of set, as Sierra’s moment of calm thoughtfulness is cut short by her rapist building a witness box around her. The crudeness of this image is an homage to the heightened politicised tableaux of Brecht; it is an example of gestus, and how the simple moving of a frame represents victims who are never able to escape the influence of their

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