Absurdism, lesson two

Next, we took a new script- Luckys' monologue from 'Waiting for Godot' and read through this scene. Basically, this scene is a large monologue of gibberish. The speaker, Lucky, speaks as if he knows what he is saying but in reading it, it is a large string of gibberish. 
With this script, we decided to interpret who we felt Lucky is. Some people in the class felt as if Lucky was a deflecting politician. He speaks like a politician who cannot answer a question, so fills his speech with fillers and questions. Because of this view, some people felt as if the play was a satirical humorous play that comically mocked politicians. 

However, i believe that the character was actually crazy and had lost his hold on the world around him. He speaks as if he what he is saying makes complete sense, and because of this, i believed that Lucky is actually speaking gibberish. 
Then, with our interpretations, we began to do some 'clowning'. This means hugely exaggerating the character and their movements. To do this, i traveled around the room and changed my pace regularly. I also gesticulated wildly and even hit myself in the head lots. I stumbled around the room, spinning and mumbling. 

Finally, we joined a group with people who had the same interpretation of the character. We joined a group of four who all believed that Lucky was mentally unstable. Then we decided upon a way to perform the piece as a group. We decided that perhaps Lucky had split personalities and was experiencing a break in reality. To show this, we decided to give each person in our group a particular 'genre' of insanity. I was psychotically crazy, James was dangerously crazy, Chloe was sad and Fiona was calm. 

To perform the piece, we created an interesting set that incorporated the absurdist ideas. It had three levels and Fiona sat on the top, i sat in the middle and James sat at the bottom. Chloe sat outside the structure. We each selected a few lines that we felt represented our emotion and performed them in order. I began and whipped around crazily, as if i was trapped in a cage, then Fiona read her lines. However, she remained still and in a place of 'zen', even though i was shaking the box. Then James read his lines shaking and struggling in his makeshift straight jacket. Finally, Chloe read her lines in the corner and when she was finished, we all stopped our movements and ended the scene. 

This section was very effective as we used only around 30% of the scene we were given, which is roughly how much we would use in our exam piece.