Lesson 5: The Debating Chamber Initial Rehearsals

At the end of Lesson 4, we were assigned our groups for the final political show, The Debating Chamber. We were each given an except form a playtext; in our case 'Hang' by Debbie Tucker Green; and were told that we were being commissioned to create a response to the text that was between 5 and 7 minutes long. Our theme wasn't capital punishment, so we decided that we would each take one of the forms of capital punishment mentioned in the extract to look at. I chose hanging.

At the beginning of Lesson 5, we split off into groups to work on our pieces. The first thing we did was brainstorm how we were going to present the text. We decided that we liked the text, it was well written, so we would keep most of it in the piece. However, in keeping with Brechtian themes, we decided to rearrange a lot of it in order to tell our own narrative while still using the stimulus. The extract begins with many an explanation of different forms of capital punishment, so we decided to make these into monologue and say them simultaneously. We also decided that we wanted at least part of the piece to include some symbolic physical work, as the act of putting someone to death is very physical, so we decided a short sequence in which I was tipped back as if in an electric chair, then flipped up into the shoulders of Kaimani, then stood on a table, ready to hang. This was important as it brought the identity of the victim into question, and, one of the main philosophical debates about this subject is how much does a criminal deserve to be treated this way, so much that they themselves become the victim.

We showed our ideas to our class in order to gain some valuable insight on what our peers thought was good and what could be improved. We got a positive response from this early devised piece, our peers said that they liked the physical aspect as it disconnected the speech from the action and made them think twice about what was being said. They also liked the way we had restructured the text so it was less clear which perspective I was talking from, and what my opinion on capital punishment is, which was a nod to the not-but moments from previous workshops. The main piece of criticism, similarly to many of the groups, is that the political agenda was not clear enough so we needed to incorporate this more into our performance. We combatted this by adding another section of text from another part of 'Hang' in which a letter is read out showing the criminal's remorse. This made it clear that we were highlighting the lack of black and white circumstances that are needed to justify taking someone's life for committing a crime