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Our contemporary showcase was an almagamation of scenes from the plays that we'd read and analysed as a whole. The initial thoughts when reading the play was that we'd find a pair and pick a scene from the selection to do an in depth scene study and performance. Subsequently we all chose relatively strong scenes which all had their story to tell.

After being informed that our scenes could be used in a showcase sense we were allowed to have more than one partner and pick more than one scene. My first partner was Eden, and we picked a scene from 'One for the road' purely for the gritty storyline. As we looked more into it, we found that there was so much more appeal to it; an example, the unspecified nature of the entire piece was incredibly captivating. Alongside that we also thought about how if we read our scene as two women, instead of two men, how it would feel. The script is not necessarily gender specific which is why it worked well  switching both genders; there was also a nice twist to the regular 'damsel in distress tale' with the partner being a woman. Another grasping aspect was the air of ambiguity, there is no evidence within our scene what's happened prior to the captive personally, we're informed on the wife and son but not her, herself. Also changing Nicholas to Nicola added to the perplexity of the scene, as an audience member, and a female, the thought of a woman inflicting such acts onto another woman  is beyond harsh and nonchalant especially as females are meant to be more emotionally attached and maternal like.

My second scene study was Danny and Jade from Motortown. I was completely excited by this scene as this is the moment in the play that the audience get to witness the sheer madness that occurs within Danny's mind. The scene starts with what is an incredibly down-played kidnapping and as Danny gets increasingly frustrated and angry within his own thoughts and feelings. He taunts, tortures and then kills Jade; my main cause of excitement with this piece was the fact that I would get the chance to play the role of the victim, whereas I'm accustomed to stronger, female characters. This role would be challenge and I was completely and utterly up for it. 

My third scene study was the character Three from the play Hang. I am utterly biased as I'm a massive debbie tucker-green fan, however, this is definitely one of my favourite plays by her. In this section I had chosen, this is point of realisation that the person guilty of the crime against her has written a letter. This letter is withheld for weeks and the contents are never revealed to audience. To get into the character mindset. I watched programs like Criminal Minds and Cold Case to help me get in the mindset of the mysterious crime. I also would observe mothers in public with their children and how they may have reacted at the sign of danger towards them. I tried to use these elements to create a rounded performance, my biggest struggle was getting into that motherly mindset (it's not for every household, but I'm aware in my household in particular, that whenever my mother is not well or upset, she conceals it very well).

Below are some images of our plans for the show:

As seen above there was a change at the final moment (the day before) for my scene with Tom to be cut as the scene was not at the standard that every other scene was. This was due to our juxtaposing work dynamic, and I also believe we both had a lot of extra responsibilities that we were juggling alongside working on our show. The decision for myself to do a monologue from the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry was made; this meant that I had less than 24 hours to go over the monologue and polish it before the performance. I read the play and then researched the trial in grave detail; every aspect of the story made me want to do the monologue more when I first looked at the evidence. The speech in particular also lead well to the themes of the show and worked well as Saskia closed the show with a monologue from the play Confirmation.