Two & Bed (Methuen Modern Plays) (Modern Classics)

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The Rise and Fall of Little Voice - Winner of: Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy of the Year; Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy directed by Sam Mendes. In the next work shop we looked at the explorative strategy of Narration, mainly looking at Self Narration as a technique. Self narration is when the character being focused on is saying what they are doing as they do them, also they could talk about memories thoughts and feelings, this gives a hint to the audience as to what might happen later or a deeper look into the focused upon character. CLARE. It feels right funny. I can feel things very fine with my body now. Very fine like the silence within silence within silence. Joey is it death-time? The row between landlord and landlady shows the two characters raw feelings about each other and how they never talked about the death of their son. The Landlady believes the Landlord blames her for the death because he closed off and didn’t want to talk about it. Throughout the row the Landlord tries to still no talk and clean the bar while the Landlady frantically wants to talk about the passing to get it all out. Finally the landlord comes round and lets out his feelings about the death and they are finally free of the tension and pain built up inside them and between their relationships. Elliot is equally as superb as the buttoned up headmistress type who reveals her secret lust for 'big men' as she is as Maudie, the long suffering girlfriend of the womanising Moth. She brings an emotional complexity to Lesley; the tortured girlfriend of the emotionally manipulative and physically abusive Roy, in what is probably the most carefully created portrait of the play. Here Justin Moorhouse draws on both his robust Northern humour and striking abilities as an actor to bring out the multifarious aspects of Roy's character and take the audience from nervous giggles to stunned, uncomfortable silence in the space of a few minutes.

Melissa Sutherland on She’s not a bad person. Honest she isn’t: Kerry O’Malley in David Fincher’s The KillerI have also learnt that Lesley might not have thought through marrying Roy at the time and is now not strong enough to leave him. As the Landlord and Landlady's painful story slowly unfolds throughout the evening, a series of regulars visit the pub - all played by Moorhouse and Elliot. Mitch Berg on “What’s the difference between an exile and an expatriate? It seems to me that an Englishman in France is an expat, but an Irishman is an exile.”— Irish poet Derek Mahon

In ‘TWO’ we identified that there were feelings of abuse, hate, anger, guilt, memory and sadness. We tried to use these feelings in our own piece. We put the anger and hate into the daughter hating her dad and her mum hating her talking about it. The guilt and the memory went into the manager and his memories of his sister’s last breaths before she died and the abuse was particularly prominent at the end when the manager grabbed the girl. The themes of hidden memories being brought up again was obvious with finding the small children’s underwear marking the beginning of out of control feelings, which just escalate until the very end of the play. The Landlord then informs the audience that time has passed and that he cares dearly about the profits of the pub unlike his wife.The scenes we looked at were Roy and Lesley and Mr. and Mrs. Igor. We choose these scenes because they have strong characters and they both look at faithfulness; Roy is trying to enforce Lesley to stay with him and Mrs. Igor is clearly being unfaithful because she states that she loves big men and she describes her husband as “Mr. feeble” From doing this explorative strategy it helped me understand what happens as couples get older and how old age can affect people. This gave me a more in depth look at the struggle the old women was going through, looking after her immobilized husband and resisting the temptation of going off with the butcher. The next explorative strategy we used was forum theatre, this when you get a character from a story and put them in different environments and situation, to develop their personalities.

Written in 1989 but still astonishingly real today, this much performed yet no less loved two-hander by the celebrated Lancastrian playwright waltzes the audience through a spectrum of human emotion, weaving a rich tapestry of life in a working class town through intimate insights into the lives of the colourful pub regulars. My initial response to the text was, it is an interesting story and I enjoyed it. It seemed to be centered on different stages of relationships. The underlying message seemed to be that trust is the key in all good relationships. This wonderfully observed character study of a traditional pub, its eccentric customers and its warring landlord and wife won the Manchester Evening News Best New Play award in 1989 and has been in production somewhere around the world ever since. It offers a credible view of a succession of ordinary people, seeking shelter from the miseries of their existence. It also goes someway to exploring the British love affair with the pub as the heart of a community; an escape and a refuge from everyday problems.From doing this explorative strategy I have learnt that there can be a lot of conflict in a relationship, also some people may not necessarily marry for love, but rather for money or social status, this seams to be the case with the Igors. Eight Miles High - Octagon * 1994 & 1995 Bristol Theatre Royal Nominated for Theatre Management Association Best Musical Award. directed by Andy Hay

CLARE. It feels like it is. ( She starts to sing to herself, very soft.) ‘Don’t know much about history. Don’t know much about society. But I do know that I love you and I know if you’d love me too what a wonderful world this would be. What a wonderful world this would be.’

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There is the old woman dropping in for a drink at the end of a gruelling day in which she has coped with her incontinent husband. There is the little old man who still talks to his dead wife and the conniving Scouser, Moth, who uses all means at his disposal to get inside his girlfriend’s purse. There’s Roy, the sadistic and controlling abuser of his girlfriend Lesley and most poignantly of all, there’s the lad whose dad forgot him on his way out. Linking them all are the Landlord and Landlady, constantly rowing because tonight is the anniversary of an event they cannot bear to discuss.