THE REVOLUTIONARY UPSTAIRS
A PLAY AT THE TRAVERSE 27/4/13
Scrapyard
is a new project set up by a group of Edinburgh based ladies. The projects
first outing was this April and called upon theatre
practitioners from all sorts of disciplines to apply to collaborate in the
project. All successful applicants were put into groups, given a stimuli and
two weeks to create a ten minute piece of theatre to be staged at the Traverse Theatre, Edinbugh.
I was allocated the
director/designer role in my group and together we created a ten minute play called The
Revolutionary Upstairs written by our two writers Andrew Wiles and Sam Siggs. The
play told a story of two lovers and how the governments' strict reduction on all things,
from the front wheel on a bike to the amount of sexual intercourse allowed per week,
affects them both personally and as a couple. Protagonist, Linz, is cut off, depressed and
day by day losing meaning in her life. Ian is a loyal employee of the government
and happily spends his days reducing the length of Shakespeare’s plays. The
play cultivates when Linz leaves Ian to join a revolution of people fighting
against any further cuts and he stays behind. The play ends when she returns to find Ian in
a state similar to the one she had left in – broken and empty.
The design shown above was inspired from Ian’s actions on stage – reducing Hamlet by ripping pages out of the text. Pages of the play or plays hang and peel off the furniture and off the characters themselves.
Linz grabs and gathers the pages throughout the play creating a sort of nest for herself on the mattress.
The next scene, post revolution, shows the stage bare of all set.
Initially I had planned on using projection to enforce the emptiness in Linz’s head. I filmed Liz staring into a camera as she recited her lines in her head. I then edited the clips together and blackened the background before scoring it with a song by Bush called ‘Out of this World. This video was intended to play throughout the entire first scene and end as Linz leaves the stage, in time with when she leaves the camera shot. However due to time restraints the play was never realised with the video.
Below is also a version of the above video but cut and edited to act as short transitional tool between scene one and two. Again we didn’t use it.
The play itself was filmed but the quality of the film is poor.
Production Photos
