Devising Political Theatre & Brecht

The article we chose was one documenting the refugee crisis and the recent demolishing of the Calais jungle. Taking this as our stimulus we devised a short political scene depicting the prejudice that refugees receive from some local people, police, and various medias. The piece started off with Roseby and I commenting on how more refugees had moved into our street and how happy we were that the heating had been fixed due to the fact it was so cold outside, we then preceded to shout verbal abuse at the people camping on the street and phoning the police to make a formal compliant about how they have been encroaching on our property. Throughout this we attempted to work in elements of subtlety to comment and reflect on this issue. For example, upon entering Roseby casually mentioned how 'cold it is outside' and 'how happy I am that the heating is fixed', as well as her mentioning a recent purchase of an expensive item from 'Wholefoods'. I'm not sure how successful this was as I think that it was possibly too subtle and so could have been glossed over. but the intended effect was to highlight how oblivious they were to how the cold would be effecting refugees living on the street and therefore they were ignorant to how fortunate they were by
 just having a warm and safe place to call home. From our window, Roseby and I continued to watch a police officer come and try to move them along, resulting in more abuse towards him from the officer. This was then interrupted by the entering of a news reporter and a cameraman who started to document the 'fight' that had broken out with the refugees acting 'violently' towards the officer.

When adapting this into the style of Brecht, the main feature we changed was the introduction of signs. We ended up creating a sign for each character and then a joint one for the two people playing refugees, each sign said 'Am I ...' and then whatever label or stereotype we wanted to characterize these people as. For example, my sign said 'Am I ... a rich, white, European?' and the cameraman's sign said 'Am I ... a media pig'. These signs were then held over our eyes and nose so you could only see your mouths, allowing everyone to hear what we were saying. This Brechtian device enables the audience to detach them selves emotionally from the piece as you can no longer see each characters faces, most importantly their eyes. It is a common saying that the eyes are the window to the soul, and therefore by removing that you remove the human connection element that audience member s make with the people on stage and therefore we just become a representation of that stereotype or concept making it easier for the audience to think over the issue. We also made it into more of a montage, with the two refugees staying still in the center the entire time as all the action, that is directly effecting them, happens around them. This make the scene less like a real life situation as the different characters aren't all engaging with each other, and therefore the audience are able to acknowledge that its a play and not a slice of real life.