Live Theatre Review Evaluation

Answer ONE of the following questions in this section with reference to the theatre performance you've seen.
Write the title, date and venue of the performance in the space provided:
Thrive, The Old Market Theatre, 04/03/17

Analyse and evaluate the performance you have seen in light of the following statement:
'Live performance has nothing to say to a younger audience'

Point Evidence Explain Link - how did it create meaning


On Saturday 4th March, I had the pleasure of seeing Thrive, a production by Zest Theatre at the Old Market Theatre in Brighton. I strongly believe that live performance does have something to say to a younger audience, especially Thrive. The performance aimed to encourage the audience to think about how precious their life is and how quickly it can be taken away. The director and actors aimed to inspire a younger audience to achieve their dreams and complete their goals before they die.

The script/writing for Thrive was devised by the company alongside the Director, Toby Ealden who had the overall concept, but took aspects of the performers own lives into account, to make the performance more meaningful to the company. By incorporating the actors own bereavements, Thrive was believable and relatable to an audience of all ages. The company also worked with a psychologist, Dr. Roger Bretherton who consulted the actors and Ealden along their journey to create Thrive. Luke Vernon, who played Raph, lost his mum shortly before the project got underway, but has said that Toby Ealden and the rest of the creatives were very supportive, and that being in the production helped him in the grieving process. This is another thing that has added to the rawness and believability of the performance, it was written based on the actors that were performing in it, creating a larger sense of meaning and impacting a younger audience who can relate to not only the characters but the actors underneath.

The soundtrack of Thrive, was an original soundtrack created by Joel Atkins specifically for the production. Other than the popular songs used in Ashleigh's house party, all of the other tracks were composed specifically depending on the mood in each scene, to reflect the tone and style of the piece. This created more meaning, as each note had been written for Thrive alone, and therefore the piece had a constant synergy, and remained dynamic and the tracks transitioned with ease. An interesting piece of sound used throughout was the last voicemail from James left on Ollie's phone. Ollie would play the voicemail over and over again, listening to James say 'love you'. This was eerie, hearing the voice of someone who has died, but it is also something that we all come into contact with when addressing a bereavement. These days, people leave up social media accounts and have unread text messages or recent photographs with someone who has died, and we all leave a lot of history behind us, our lives are more documented than ever before. The repetition of the voicemail created meaning between Daniel Morgan who plays Ollie and the audience, as it was relatable and a situation many of the audience members may have come across when grieving their own losses. Also, this appeals specifically to a younger generation as the main users of new technology and social media, who take things such as voicemails from friends for granted.

There were only 3 cast members in Thrive: Claire Gaydon (Ashleigh), Daniel Morgan (Ollie), and Luke Vernon (Raph). Each character showed a different response to grief and bereavement, which was shown through the performers choices in movement and vocals. Ashleigh responded to James' death by hiding her emotions and throwing a party. Claire Gaydon showed the audience that Ashleigh was hiding her feelings by changing the pitch and pace of her voice, often making Ashleigh talk very very fast, or blurting out swear words in a jokey voice at inappropriate moments. She laughed a lot, despite the loss that she was dealing with which is often a defence mechanism that may have been adopted by audience members. Ollie responded to James' death completely differently, which caused arguments between him and Ashleigh. He locked himself in his bedroom, and became almost obsessed with listening to the sound of James' voice on the voicemail. Ollie found it more difficult than Ashleigh to let go. Daniel Morgan showed this through movement, allowing his character to be very stiff, and not laughing or responding to Ashleigh's madness. He isolated himself from the other characters, and replayed certain phrases or movements to show him replaying the events over and over in his head, and the voicemail too. Ralph responded to James' death by creating a bucket list of things he wants to do before he dies. Although similarly to Ollie, he is deeply upset by James' passing, he did not know him personally so will not miss him in the same way. Instead, it is a wake up call to him, and he realises how precious his own life is, and that he would like to make something of himself. This is very relatable to a younger audience, as many young people worry about what on earth they are going to do with their life. At the end of the performance, Raph asked the audience to write down what they would like to do before they die. For a younger audience member like myself, this was difficult as there was so much choice, yet it was difficult to choose something that was neither monotonous nor too ambitious. The three characters responses to bereavement created meaning, as each audience member was likely to relate to one of the characters responses in their own life, and by writing what they wanted to do before they died, the audience left the theatre with a new perspective and maybe even a new goal.

Thrive had very complex set and props consisting of 9 ladders and 4 main areas of set: the three characters bedrooms and the part of the estate where James died in the centre. The ladders were used in unique ways, the actors would often climb them to create status through levels, or sometimes sit on them to create the sensation of sitting on a roof somewhere or up a tree, looking out at the night sky. The performance was Promenade, which the actors constantly walking amongst the audience, which created meaning by making the audience feel part of the action. Many of the props used in the performance were symbolism for something else. For instance, the characters planted a tree in memory of James, which helped them to overcome their loss and begin to move on together. My favourite prop was the Rubix Cube. When James' died, Raph found the Rubix cube in his bag, unsolved. As he was struggling with grief after the accident, Raph decided that he would try to solve the Rubix cube as a project for himself, but he started to feel obliged to solve it, for James. At the end of the play, when the characters finally found themselves able to move on from James' death and the three became friends, Raph finally solves the Rubix cube. This was an extremely clever use of symbolism, as all the time Raph was struggling with his grief and pain, he couldn't solve it, but once he overcame his loss and started talking and opening up with Ashleigh and Ollie, he was able to solve it and cross it off the top of his bucket list. A small prop like this can create meaning between Raph and the audience, when he solved it at the end it was a memorable moment in the whole performance, everything was ok again, it reminded the audience that things do get better and life can go back to normal following a bereavement. It was very impactful and created a lot of meaning.

In conclusion, Thrive was a brilliant piece of live theatre, that I believe had a lot of meaning, especially for a young audience. The way the actors conducted themselves to play roles that related to young people, but dealt with a serious topic whilst involving humour but also stunning the audience into silence was amazing. Toby Ealden's decision to use the cast's own experiences of bereavement added greater meaning to the production and made the characters much more believable and relatable to anyone and everyone who has struggled with a bereavement. The character of Raph specifically stood out to me as a character who changed the minds of the audience, and left people leaving with a different perspective on life as the one they came in with.

Our Brand New Piece!

In a dramatic twist of fate, we decided to scrap our whole piece and start again with just 6 weeks until our performance. None of us were truly comfortable with our characters, and we didn't know what each characters intentions were. We think that we got too carried away with the Cinderella story and the theme of body image, and therefore our storyline suffered. Many of our scenes were boring, and although there was a lot of dialogue, our characters weren't actually saying anything, which made improvisation even harder and slowed down the entire devising process.


Myself and Charlotte Trimble came up with the idea of a twisted version of Wizard of Oz, after being inspired by some creepy artwork we saw on the internet.




When we started to google 'creepy wizard of Oz', we found some pretty disturbing pictures which inspired write out a pretty horrifying storyline. Scene by scene, this was the narrative that we came up with:
1- Dorothy wakes up in an asylum where a super creepy Doctor sedates her.
2- Dorothy wakes up in a disgusting 'Oz', where she meets a scarecrow and a Tin Man with their heart and brain torn out.
3- FREAK SHOW! A random yet horrifying circus scene featuring some sick circus acts.
4- Physical Theatre/SC and TM decide to take Dorothy to Witch. They follow the yellow brick road.
5- SC and TM fall asleep in the poppies, Dorothy wakes up in the asylum and creepy Doctor puts her in a cage.
6- SC and TM wake up and tell the story of the red shoes. Then they find Dorothy and laugh at her.
7- The witch appears and tells SC and TM to take Dorothy's heart and brain, they savage her. The end!


So our rather cheery piece had been planned out, and we cast our characters:
Dorothy - Charlotte Morley
Scarecrow - Charlotte Trimble
Tin Man - ME
Doctor/Witch - Matthew Holley


Already we were even more passionate and excited about this new piece than we had ever been about our Cinderella one, and as a group we fully dedicated ourselves to extra rehearsals outside of lessons to make sure we made up enough time to complete the piece.


We started working on our opening scene, and now our characters were bigger and more adventurous, we found it a lot easy to explore the physicality behind them and use our voices in different ways. For example, after being shocked in an electric chair, my character does a roly-poly and jumps into the air before spinning in circus with the Scarecrow and falling into Dorothy's lap. The characters of the Tin Man and Scare crow are more loose, and our voices randomly change in pitch, because we are constantly trying to frighten Dorothy and creep out the audience.


Matthew Holley took on the role of the creepy Doctor amazingly well. His laugh is genuinely the creepiest thing I've ever heard, and we encouraged him to treat Dorothy like more of an animal that a human, and this worked especially well when it came to him putting her into the cage. Charlotte Morley was great at playing the character of Dorothy, which was quite similar to the role of Cinderella, however we are still working as a group on how to make Dorothy more eccentric and creepy, after all she is living inside a mental asylum. The transition of our characters from who we played in Cinderella to who we play in this new piece has worked really well. In Cinderella, myself and Charlotte Trimble played a duo of sadistic fairies, and now we continue to work together as a duo in this piece as well. Matthew Holley was playing the wicked step-mother before, and now he'd the wicked doctor and witch. It seems we all have a type cast!


Building on our new piece, we didn't want to make the same mistakes that we made last time, and as a group we decided that the corny humour and not-funny jokes that we tried to incorporate into our old piece just weren't working. Seeing as this piece would be dark and horrifying, we didn't want to incorporate comedy, and this worked well for our new characters. Also, trying to come up with funny jokes took up a lot of our devising time in our last piece, and creeping the audience out is much easier than making them laugh. After devising the first few scenes of our piece, we took some time out of the theatre space to design the set. Although none of the names of the original characters will be said out loud in our piece, we wanted there to be some evil gestures to the original movie on stage, easter eggs for the ravid Wizard of Oz fans who probably wont be in the audience, however we thought by packing the stage with unknown myths about the original movie would encourage us to work well in our surroundings. We wanted some obvious hints, for example the Wicked Witches legs poking out from underneath the stage, wearing the red slippers, and and yellow brick road running across the stage. We also did some research into unknown facts about the film, and found that theres a myth surrounding a suicidal munchkin hanging himself during filming, and so we'll hang a munchkin in the corner of the stage, and one of the medications that Dorothy is taking will be a medication which contributed to the death of Judy Garland.