Berkoff: Decadence

Once we had got a general understanding of Metamorphosis and how Steven Berkoff writes and acts, we were given an extract from the script, Decadence. In a previous lesson, we watched the Year 11's perform Sarah Kaine's Crave. Crave has an extremely similar layout to Decadence. Decadence however, was written before Sarah Kaine wrote Crave. Both Decadence and Crave are both set out with no stage directions or anything, only slashes between sentences, to break the script up.

We were given the opportunity to pick our partners and I chose to work with Michelle as I thought we could have our own creative interpretation of Decadence. Our take on decadence is that we are the same person, who loved a man, who betrayed them and now they are planning revenge on him and thinking of all the different ways to kill him. Michelle plays the more evil and dark side of the character, who wants revenge and I play the guilty side of the character and still loves him and doesn't want to kill him as much as Michelle's side of this character. We decided that in the end, the lights would go down and the last scene is me laying on the floor, "dead," where the side of me that wanted revenge got the better of me.
We wanted our performance to be very different from the other groups. We decided to have our audience in a scattered semi-circle, with another behind them and another depending on how many people we will perform for (despite not being examined on the final, polished performance, we decided as a class to perform for people.)

We also wanted to break the fourth wall and really involve the audience. We haven't decided yet whether we want to focus on different members on the audience or on one particular member, therefore they would be the "lover" that we plot against. To help break the fourth wall, we decided that at the beginning of the piece, we would be sat opposite each other, in the audience. To which we begin our lines, "Cor, Blimey!" "Shh! You're putting me off!," we decided that Michelle would say the first line to the member of the audience who is sitting next to her and I would reply, like she is disrupting the performance, to which the audience will be very confused because there is no performance on stage yet. 
For our makeup, we decided that for Michelle we would have white face makeup and use black to hollow out our faces and I would have the same but with red features.  We decided to do this because we wanted to show the personalities of our characters. As Michelle's is very violent and dangerous and mine is very calm and collected. For our costume we decided to both dress in all black or Michelle would be in all black and I would be in red, including costume makeup.