First meeting with supervisor - Jo Scott

Today we met with our supervisor Jo Scott for the first time, which I personally found to be a very positive experience. We spoke in great detail about what we wanted to achieve in terms of this piece, and I think she seemed quite impressed and intrigued. We expressed that we really wanted to focus on this aspect of immersive theatre and draw on Brechtian techniques, such as breaking down the fourth wall, multi rolling and exploring this idea that in epic theatre actors play character believably but still with this element of the audience being clear that the actors have not 'become' the characters. We want to create this aspect that we are actors playing characters not actors becoming a character or another person, we want the audience to be constantly wondering who we may play next. Additionally i think if we have this, audience members will feel and aspect of relatability to these characters, if we play them in a heightened manner. However, we want there to be a part of the audience that feels as though they cannot feel empathy towards the characters we play with onstage, as our piece will be so fast paced they will not have the time, and we will not give them that time during the play, they will leave the theatre and ponder on it later. 

Additionally we highlighted to Jo that we want this play to come across as 'a play within a play', in that we are putting on a play about the cafe as well as there being an inner narrative of actors being controlled and instructed into the different roles within the cafe and the audience being fully informed of this. 

Jo made a few suggestions, that we need to explore this idea of immersive theatre and how we set to achieve this in our final performance. So I suggested that we could perhaps experiment with exploring a few scenes in the university cafeteria and see how people react to us in a very public setting. 

Additionally because we highlighted we are wanting to create some puppets for the old couple scene and Jo highlighted that we really need to consider how we want to achieve this, as it is something that is very stylised and needs to be worked on well or it will not have a good effect on the audience and we risk it looking stupid. Furthermore Jo has instigated that our piece seems quite like the Carryl Churchill play, Love and Information, so it is apparent that we will need to do some research there.