In our piece our group wanted to communicate and educate the audience on drug use and the affect that drugs can have on a person’s mind and lifestyle/choices. We wanted to communicate this to the audience through serious scenes as well as creating humour to not make the performance to dark and a constant negative vibe. We choose to do this through creating dark scenes known as ‘dream scenes’ as well as using the lighting and creating a lot of the dark vibes with the music we used in the background. We decided to use songs by The Tiger Lilies as they have a lack of beat and the lyrics that are used have a sinister vibe in the songs, which adds to the darkness of the scene. We wanted to show what drugs can do to a young person’s mind, and how they can almost completely take over the way your life goes. We also used the lighting to show this throughout, by using natural everyday lights of yellows and white whilst doing the naturalistic scenes, and then used coloured lights and the strobes too show the weirdness of the dreams, as well as to highlight the idea of your mind going to different places and having different thoughts whilst under the influence of the drugs Jack has been taking. We also wanted to show the effects that drugs can have on the actions taken, not just what they do to the mind. We showed this through the characterisation carried in Harrys character of Jack as at the start of the piece his character has a friendly and enthusiastic personality but as the performance continues we see his character traits change as he becomes more aggressive towards family and friends and begins to become more independent and pushes people away. I feel this was effective to the audience, as you could see Jacks relationship begin to fall apart, by tones of voice changing for example when Jack says the line “It’s none of your business anyway, why do you care?” and you start to hear the sarcastic and vicious tone in his voice, which later leads to the end of the piece where Jack sees himself in an argument with his ‘best friend’ and you can physically feel the tension building up between them. Another example created to show the effect of drugs of the human mind and its actions would be the last scene ‘Butchered’ and the acting brought into that, this scene was created to be a big plot twist on the whole performance, but to also create confusion to the audience of whether it was real life or fantasy. I feel this was effective as for example when using the song ‘Jack- TigerLillies’ to create a fearful affect, in the piece, and I feel the song and strobed red lighting, created the idea of an uncontrollable thought that was being created as it goes on to then end into the idea of ‘Jack the Ripper’ and by switching the characterisation to a strange, scary character that is uncontrollable, and used this to show what drugs can do.

We also wanted to communicate to the audience the humour side to our piece, we wanted to show that life is not always bad no matter what and that there can be good times in all negative situations. We also used a sense of humour nearer the beginning more than when the performance started to finish because we wanted to use the humour to show the connection between Jack and his family, and create a bond. We choose to show this through our characterisation and the personalities we created for their characters. All our characters were created to have a funny element to them as we thought this would benefit the audience interaction and the way the audience watched the piece to entice them into the piece. I feel this worked really well as we made the audience laugh on different occasions, for example when the characters of the Nan and Mum done a dance to an old fashioned song, we added this to have a random scene that doesn’t really connect to the performance to add an aspect of Kneehigh but we wanted it to be humorous so that the audience would stay interacted and interested.