The Only Way Is Up: Introduction
Our devised piece was based on the given title “The Only Way Is Up”. The main theme of our story is imprisonment, and how the greed of some of the most powerful and the fear of everyone as a whole could quickly change people’s perceptions on life.
The story starts with two “prisoners” in an unmentioned building, assumed to be a prison. A security guard puts them both into the same cell, and they quickly discover that they both lead very different lives prior to being locked up. They both scheme on how to get out of the cell with the help of the security guard, who overhears them discussing their plans and wants to help them escape. She feels their pain, as she herself is a past prisoner who’s serving community time by helping the government and guarding the prisons. Over time, Blake, the rich prisoner, finds that the escape might actually be possible with the help of Alex, the guard, but the poor prisoner, Asha starts to doubt a peaceful life outside the walls.
We did research a few different attempted prison breaks, including a guy who escaped prison through the food slot of the cell wall. We will try to include these in conversations between the three characters when they are scheming on ways to get out. However, I would like to conduct more research on attempted and successful prison breaks and escapes as I feel that I could add them into the development of the play to make it more realistic.
The three objectives that I would like to achieve are: 1. Staying in character: Even as we’re simply improvising now, I have a really hard time sticking to the pre-defined characteristics of my character. Blakes isn’t supposed to have an optimistic outlook on her time in the prison until further on down the road, when the guard helps her and Asha. However, in rehearsals I keep acting overly optimistic. I had a similar problem in trying to act out Cool for A Little Box of Oblivion. I will need to tone it down a Lot in order to go with what I had set for my character.
2. Learning how music and lighting could affect the setting and tone of the piece: In the previous recorded piece, we didn’t really include that much detail into our music or lighting. Experimenting different lights with the coloured gels and seeing how the music fits and compliments the tone of the scenes would be really interesting to learn, and I could further apply this knowledge into other scenes that we do in the future.
3. Actually figure out a proper ending: At this point of time, my team have been trying to develop the characters as much as we can, especially Alex. Now that we have spent a lot of time discussing the backstories of the characters, I really would like to achieve a great ending. To me, a great ending to this piece is something that sounds and completely looks like and ending but could also keep the audience thinking a bit after watching the piece about what happens next. So far, I’ve thought about having Asha realise that it had all happened in her head, and that there is no way for her to get out of the prison. However, we haven’t fully settled on this idea so we’ve got to brainstorm about this in our own time.
