Devising #1 - Family Feud

In this session, myself, Faye and Saskia looked at Top Girls in relation to the tasks we had done in the previous acting session. We considered the context of the piece, who the characters were, where the scene was playing out and how old they were in relation to each other. For the context, it was already in the given circumstances of the script, Marlene, Joyce and Angie are all at Joyce’s house, and Marlene had skipped the previous Christmas and so is sweetening Angie up by buying her presents. It was fairly obvious that Joyce was Angie’s mother, and that Marlene was Joyce’s sister, by Angie’s use of the words ‘Aunty Marlene’ when exclaiming about Joyce’s new perfume. The scene was playing out in Joyce’s house, that much is obvious, as Marlene is blatantly uncomfortable, and Joyce offers her tea as opposed to Marlene offering the tea.

The ages are where it gets confusing, as it never specifies just how old any of them are, so we discussed Angie at roughly eleven, yet we never really discussed Joyce and Marlene’s ages as they seemed less important to the storyline. If I had to give a rough idea into their ages, I would say Marlene is in her late forties, early fifties and Joyce is in her early forties, with about five years between them.

Later, we realised that Angie is roughly sixteen, although in my opinion Churchill wrote her in to be much more immature than most sixteen year olds through her use of speech and the fact that she talks about playing with ‘dolls’, which suggests that Joyce is a bit of a lenient, not-really-bothered type of parent until the fear of being judged by Marlene comes into play.

After performing it to the class, it was noted that my portrayal of Joyce was far posher than it needed to be. I saw it more as Joyce was trying to live up to her sisters expectations, trying to act more like her in a desperate, but silent plea for her approval.