Evaluation of East End Tales

Evaluation of East End Tales
As the end of the term nears our class looked back on the rest of the term and talked about the play itself. Fin Kennedy created a aura of shock and a huge emotional state towards the readers and I feel that during the performance our group relayed that same emotional state.

We did this by using the sounds we produced with the bond of silent movement. These two effects helped give our piece the shock we needed and the negative emotion to the audience. Furthermore, by using the way we performed the play through physical theatre we created a higher level and more complex piece rather than a simple literal piece. However, this type of performance comes at a huge cost. Sometimes, the audience were confused about the plot and what we were acting out. For example, my parents had no idea what the shopping tale with the old women ordering bread and beans was about as they couldn't follow it clearly. In addition, some of the scenes were very long, almost 3 to 4 pages so we would have to cut them to make sure we could fit the length of the performance on schedule, by doing this we would also cut quite important parts of the play of which the audience would have needed to fully understand the plots.

The play itself is set in, of course, the East End in London, many of us from the school actually live in the East End so it was simple to try and describe it, for example Ms Lee said that she hears sirens during the night. Some people in our class went a step further to try and produce and East End accent which, to describe it simple, is very relaxed and low pitched. My character in particular was Caribbean and is described as sly, with a storm brewing in his eyes. To make this emotion visible to the audience I had a slight clench in one of my fists to imitate anger.

Though we worked on our individual scene for weeks we still had a lot of lines to learn for the show. The entire ending had to be learned by someone to perform and with only 2 hours left until the shows began I took up the lines and began learning them I added actions on the way to make sure the characters thoughts were clear to the audience and when the final show came about we were ready for the performance. My favourite scene from the play has got to be the boys tale, I feel during this scene we really used the physical theatre to describe the men of the East End such as drinking beer in the bar or smoking a cigar etc.

In conclusion, I have learned a lot about physical theatre during this term. I had a ruff idea that it was to do with sounds and physically using your body to convey emotions but I didn't realise that vocals could also be used to a high extent too with the combination of sounds, vocal and physical movement the East End Tales play by Fin Kennedy was a perfect pick to use the unique type of theatre.