Devising The Ending

On Tuesday we had a rehearsal where we refined things, ran them, did a rough ending, which we changed a few times and generally just cleaned bits up.

We changed the ending a couple of times because we were seeing what would work better and how we could visually create more of an impact on the audience. Our first ending was that Tom, Liyah and Dee would read out the poem and we would sit dotted around in our couples, watching Molly and James do their physical theatre piece.

This was an average ending, but it didn't really feel like a definite ending, so, on Wednesday, Simon devised us to do something that felt a lot more powerful. We then came up with the ending where we file on in lines and line by line we drop to the floor. This was really powerful, but took a long time to figure out. We put our heads down as we lowered ourselves to the ground in a kneeling position, to make it look like we were grave stones. The women then come and look around us, as if trying to find the grave of their loved one. They then lower themselves next to us and kneel next to our graves, mourning. This looked very powerful and happens while Molly and James keep doing their physical theatre piece and at the very end poppies fall on them from above.

This was a very beautiful ending and although it took a very, very long time to be able to kneel line by line, once we managed to get the timings correct, it looked very powerful and moving. Perfect for the ending of our piece.