Grace Lockyer

Our class production was Teechers. This is about a comprehensive school with a lot of problems such as a lack of funding, undisciplined students and soft teachers. The play shows the journey of a new teacher, Nixon, who the pupils become very fond of, and how he ends up leaving to go to a better public school.

Our performance was done in a round instead of seating them all in rows along one wall. This made our performance a lot more personal and it was easier to communicate with the audience. We wanted the audience to feel involved in the play, not as if they were just onlookers. We tried to improve their feeling of involvement through the lighting. Our lighting was not very dark, as it typically would be, but quite bright. This meant that the actors could see the audience’s faces which meant we were able to look them in the eyes. As the audience felt they were involved, our actions got a better reaction. Also, there was a lot of direct address which if the audience were in darkness, would have been a lot harder to make genuine. We needed to be able to see our audience in order to interact and the brighter lighting enabled us to do that. At one point in the play, a massive boy is meant to come on stage and become a scary pupil. We wanted to create humour by using a contrast and we did this through the sound. We also wanted to create an atmosphere through lighting. We made a voice over of a really low voice making the audience believe a giant guy was going to come on, when instead a small boy came on. This created humour because the audience already had an image of what the boy would look like, so when Ryan came on, it was a complete contrast. When Ryan was talking about how he once locked a teacher in a store room cupboard, there was a spotlight on him which showed that everything was about him and it created tension.