Masquerade Murder Mystery

Index

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Performance Project

We decided it would be best to use a pre-made murder mystery game set as a stimulus and foundation for our piece. We want to create an entertaining murder mystery that is also profitable, which with a cast our size, 11 Actors and 2 backstage would require a lot of work planning and creating characters. This would be fun to do, we just don't have the time to create backstories, motives and alibis for 11 characters along with creating the show around those characters and then writing it all. The pre-made murder mystery game set would do a lot of that for us and we can adapt the story to suit our needs. So we took inspiration from the previous year and picked out a murder mystery game set, one that we could easily be set around Christmas time.

Website:

We set up a website to help market the show.

Masquerade Murder Mystery 

Responsibilities and Planning

Responsibilities:

• Ryan - Directing, performance project (PP)

• Hollyann - Directing, PP

• Charlotte - Producing Theatre, PP

• Josh - Management role, Lighting Design

• Sam - PP, Set Design

• Basia - Hair and Makeup design, PP

• Thomas - Devising Theatre (DV) 

• Will - DV, Lighting 

• Faith - DV, Costume Construction

• Phoebe - DV

• Kian - DV

• Fru - DV, Costume Construction

• Emily - Hair and Makeup Application

Departments:

• Sound and lighting: Josh and Will

• Hair and Makeup: Basia and Emily

• Set and Props: Sam, Kian and Thomas

• Marketing: Charlotte and Sam

• Directors: Hollyann and Ryan

• Choreographers: Charlotte and Phoebe

• Costume: Fru and Faith

Timeline:

After discussing with Hollyann, Josh, Charlotte and Sonia this was the firmed up timeline:

• 20 September: Characters assigned

• 27 September: Performance Proposals due (what everyone would like the performance to look like from their POV). 

• 30 September: Pt 1 blocked

• 11 October: Pt 2 blocked

• 18 October: Talk to clients, Marketing deadline

• 24 October: Hair, Makeup, Costumes, Set, Props lists and Script Deadline.

• 08 November: Lighting plan, Budget Deadline and Pt 3 Blocked

• 15 November: Story cemented (not going to be changed drastically from now)

• 22 November: Pt 4 blocked, Set, Props and costume Making deadline, lines learnt. 

• 29 November: Performable, Venue arrange and prep, Food and Drink buying

• 05 December: Tech programming and Rehearsal

• 06 December: Dress rehearsal/Practice run (TBC)

• 12 December: Performance at 6pm (Confirmed by client)

Inspirations and Research

Masters of Mystery game:

This was our main bit of inspiration and research. This helped us to plan out all of the characters, motivations and the plot. Using this very basic structure we created an outline that our story could follow. We of course changed things and added things to it too, so that it flowed better and felt like an actual story rather than a game. We also added in that Phoebes character, the hare, gets murdered in it as well. Which helped to create a more natural way of finding the second piece of evidence. But having the game as a jumping off point really helped us out in the long run, as it saved us so much time creating characters, backstories, motivations and we could instead focus on the story and acting.

Previous Years Murder Mystery:

These are videos of the previous years performance. This helped us to see what kind of style was used previously and what worked with it. This did help to show us that since we have a bigger cast that we would have to adapt differently to the material we had, one thing being that we wouldn't be able to focus on all of the characters as deeply as we just didn't have the time for it and that we would need to choose certain characters to focus on. But they also showed us that the Christmas murder mystery was a tried and tested model that worked out really well in the past, as they managed to raise around £600 for charity.

Agatha Christie:

Agatha Christie is the mother of the murder mystery genre. She is known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Christie's stories deal with timeless themes like greed, jealousy, love, and betrayal and she is credited with introducing and perfecting many of the genre's most enduring conventions, including: 

• The central crime, usually a murder.

• A closed circle of suspects with motive, means, and opportunity.

• A detective who uses deductive reasoning to solve the crime.

• The detective explaining the solution to the crime to the suspects and the reader.

She is a clear influence for many murder mystery stories including ours. Our story also includes themes of love, jealousy and betrayal and includes a lot of the conventions she introduced like the crime being a murder and a close circle of suspects.

Characters

Me and my co-director Hollyann decided that we'll pick out some of the more interesting sounding characters to use in our show. We have 11 actors so we picked out 10 characters from the game, cause we knew we wanted there to be a detective character who would essentially be the host of the game but the detective doesn't have their own character sheet. These are the characters we ended picking:

• The Countess - Party host, wealthy widow and queen of society, you need her approval to do anything.

• The Dragon - Single man of large fortune, nephew of the countess, main target for a lot of women.

• The Dove - young and quite naïve, very pretty and has recently inherited a large fortune.

• The Lion - retired military, wealthy, and craves power and social status. doesn't tolerate anyone from the lower class.

• The Stag - Was in love as a young man but wasn't allowed to marry her, so never married anyone.

• The Hare - Life and soul of the party, jolly and drunk, loves to celebrate any occasion.

• The Bluebird - Upper class, rich, dislikes the lower classes, desires to move up in society.

• The Wolf - Had money but wasted it, now has to fend for himself, lies a lot.

• The Turtle - Quick to anger, jealous, wants to help their family but doesn't go about it well.

• The Weasel - Vain, selfish, has a profession but still seeks a rich woman to marry to move up ranks.

• The Detective - used to control the audience and steer the story. 

• Red Cloak - The murder victim. Had dealings with all the suspects.

We ended up removing the Turtle later on, we cast Will to play him but because his unit for this term is lighting operation we figured he couldn't really act on stage and operate the lights at the same time. Instead we decided to cast him as Red Cloak, the murder victim, as this would mean he could be in it at the very start and quickly get killed off so he could go and operate the lights. 

Update: This way of doing it worked because the lighting controls were up in the lighting box. Unfortunately we ended up moving the lighting controls next to the stage so we could have to room in the lighting box for Red Cloak and the Hare to do their death scenes. With this though it made it hard to have Will play Red Cloak and also be able to control the lights, because Red Cloak was dying in the lighting box. 

So we had a small meeting with me and Hollyann (the directors), Charlotte (the producer) and Josh (stage manager) to discuss what to do about it and we came to the conclusion that it would be best to recast Red Cloak. This was alright with Will as the unit he was doing for this project was lighting operation so it was more important for him to focus on that. Plus we had also already given him the role as the narrator which worked better as he could pre record his lines, it also worked towards a later unit for him, that being voice for actors.

We ended up asking Emily if she'd be happy to play Red Cloak for us, Which she very kindly agreed to do. Which was good as she was the only one who would be free during the performance. Everyone else was either already in the show or was doing something behind the scenes during it. Luckily Emily was doing Hair and Make up application so she was free during the performance.  

Characters Relations:

• Detective - dislikes murder and rich snobs 

• The countess - likes dragon, dove and lion - Dislikes Red Cloak and the poor

• The dragon -  likes countess, dove  - Dislikes Red Cloak

• The dove - likes dragon, countess  - Dislikes Red Cloak

• The lion - Likes countess, stag, bluebird - Dislikes hare, Red Cloak

• The stag - likes lion - dislikes Red Cloak

• The hare - likes alcohol  - dislikes Red Cloak, lion

• The bluebird - likes lion - Dislikes Red Cloak

• The wolf - likes - Dislikes Red Cloak

• The weasel -  likes rich people - Dislikes Red Cloak, the poor

Cast and Crew

The Cast:

We decided it would be best if we all sat down together and decided on who should play who. Me and Hollyann read out the character's description and as a group we decided who would play which character. This is the final cast list we ended up with:

Behind The Scenes Crew:

My Character

The Stag:

This is the character we chose would be best for me and with his backstory we chose him to be the murderer for our piece. His reason for killing Red Cloak is that he hired Red Cloak to find his long lost love and Red Cloak lied about finding her so he could keep taking the stags money, but he also began to blackmail the stags long lost love. The stag isn't someone who is just going to allow someone to disrespect him and someone he loves like that.

All the information I need for the stag has come from the character sheet. This has been very helpful for me when trying to create my character as a lot of the work is already done for me. As the director these character sheets have also helped as I've used them to understand all of the characters in the show and when it came to scripting it helped immensely, as most of the dialogue we could take from these character sheets. We had to change them to make them feel more natural and less robotic but these character sheets were a great starting point.

I think my character would be looking for someone to pin it on, to divert attention from him and put attention onto someone else. Someone like the Detective or the Lion, I also thought that my character would question why there just so happened to be a detective at the party.

We did an exercise on exaggeration levels of our characters, 1 being tiny movements, 10 being exaggerated to the extreme. I feel like my character wouldn't be very exaggerated. I think he would be trying to keep it all together, hiding any hint that he's the murderer, with the occasional break in the façade. I also feel like he'd find a lot of the people around him to be idiots, he wouldn't take them seriously at all. He'd have a false sense of confidence, thinking they won't be able to figure out that he was the one who did it. Which would cause him to not be particularly tense for most of it, until he's revealed at the end of course. So I'd give him a tension level of 4 for most of the show, then moving to a 6 at the end.

Character Sheet:

The Script

Script Planning:

Before we could write the script we had to plan out what we wanted the story to be and what we wanted to happen during the show. I started by going through all the character sheets and learning about all the characters. This included their relationships to each other and to Red Cloak, Their motivations for why they may want to kill Red Cloak, Their backstories, Their class, Their opinions about the poor, everything the character sheets had in them and I did that for all the characters.

Using the character sheets it was clear there was a structure we could follow to create our story. It went as followed:

• Murder happens

• Everyone does an Introduction

• People then start bringing forward knowledge on the other characters and accuse them of the crime

• They then question each other and we find out their motives

• They then question each other again with the knowledge of how the murder was committed

• They then question each other again trying to find out  who would have the opportunity to kill Red Cloak

• They then accuse who they think committed the murder

• They all do final statements and the murderer reveals that they did it

Using this very basic structure we created an outline that our story could follow. We of course changed things and added things to it to, so that it flowed better and felt like an actual story rather than a game. We also added in that Phoebes character the hare gets murdered in it as well, which helped it feel more natural when we found the second piece of evidence.

• Story Outline

Start 

Narrator greets the audience - welcomes them, gets them to take their seats when the show starts.

The countess greets everyone and introduces herself, 

Murder happens at 10, *clock strikes at 10 - maybe*

Inspector introduction - could only have been one of the actors, not the audience. 

Everyone introduction *maybe shorten the monologues*

Round 1 - getting to know everyone

Everyone throwing sus at each other

People start arguing. Chaos

Detective calms everyone down and brings in evidence 

*Countess - accuses the poor of being the ones to commit the murder.*

*Hare - accuses the military because they have the know-how to commit murder.*

Round 2 - evidence 

Evidence points to 7 particular people 

Detective/ the suspects ask the 7 suspects questions *Maybe just the detective asks the questions*

Wolf, dove, stag, lion, bluebird, countess, hare

Detective gets the audience to ask questions

The Hare dies

Round 3 - the letter

Evidence narrows it down and points to 4 people.

Stag. Lion, Weasel, Wolf

The detective questions them

People accuse the lion

Go back to the audience for questions

Round 4 - The murderers letter

The murderer invited Red Cloak to the terrace for a drink at 10

Detective questions or gets the audience to choose who to question.

Detective calms everyone down again and gets the audience to choose who they think did it.

Final round - Final accusations

Light show lighting up all the suspects - impactful music

*Lights could slowly go out until the only light on is the murderer*

*Lights go crazy for a bit until the murderer is lit up red*

Murderer gives their final statement

Detective arrests them and takes them away.

End 

Accusations:

I decided it would be best if we planned out the accusations scene properly. We decided pretty early on that we wasn't going to necessarily use the accusations from the character sheets and that we would throw our own ones in, ones we thought would fit the characters. We also had the character back talk each other so it felt like they was actually reacting to what was being said. I wanted this scene to feel chaotic, I wanted it to have a nice flow to it and for their to be basically no breaks in-between lines and I think in the end we achieved that, everyone bounced off eachother really well.

• Accusation Scene

Start

Countess accuses the poor

Dragon accuses the men

weasel / wolf accuse the broken hearted

Hare accuses the military.

Lion says they heard the hare saying they’ll kill Red Cloak.

Wolf asks the hare why they said that

Stag says she couldn’t have done it because she's drunk.

Bluebird says she's faking it.

Dove accuses Bluebird saying it was because she was left at the altar.

Bluebird says no, but dove did it because she was jealous of her relationship to Red Cloak, he didn’t love her.

Splits the group

Dragon defends dove. Don't you dare put this on my sister. Insults her.

Lion defends bluebird. Leave her out of this, she wouldn’t do this. We’ve been a part of the countess's family for years, why would we do this? 

weasel reads his bible until something bad is said about the countess.

The Countess tries to break them up.

Wolf accuses the countess because she threw Red Cloak out of society for an incident with her son.

Countess starts shouting, how dare he accuse her,

Weasel defends countess, arguing with the wolf.

Bluebird argues with dove and dragon 

The countess and weasel argue the wolf

The hare and lion argue, and the stag tries to break them up.

Detective breaks everyone up coming in with new evidence

End

The Final Draft:

After I had put all the narrators lines, I went through and changed all of my lines to fit better with the adjustments I had made. One of the sections I changed the most was my confession at the end and the lines after it. Charlotte Rich made the point that the end seemed to be a bit too rushed and ended too abruptly and I agreed, so when I was going over this section I made some extensions to some lines that I thought would work better and I also added a part where the rest of the suspects react to me being revealed as the murderer. I thought it felt a bit off before that they didn't say anything or react to the big reveal. So I added it in that they all get angry and start having a go at him to show how they are feeling about the situation.

As I was writing more of the script the idea came to my head that we should question the detective. I was going through scene 5, the second bit of questing, and saw that it felt like it went a bit too quickly. So to try and beef up the scene a bit more I thought it would be a fun idea to question the detective. My thinking was that my character would be looking for someone to pin it on, to divert attention from him and put attention onto someone else, I also thought that my character would question why there just so happened to be a detective at the party. I took the idea to my co-director Hollyann and discussed it with her. She liked the idea and said to do it. So me and Sam (the Detective) sat down together and started writing the scene. Our method for is basically just improving it. We both know our characters very well by this point and we know what we want the scene to be. So we just go back and forth riffing off of each other until we got the scene we wanted. I polished it up a bit and we came up with the idea to get the audience to ask questions as well.

Evidence packs and Table set-ups

Test Tables:

Day to Day Logbook

27th September:

Warmups 

Vocal warmup

Focus exercises - number game, close your eyes and count to 20, splat?

Hot seating  

Improv scenarios - bank heist, dentist, Disneyland, 

Production meeting

Talk about their ideas for their departments

Make sure everyone knows the general idea for the production.

Make sure everyone goes away with an idea of what they should be working towards.

Finish off with some commedia dell'arte exercises to help the actors better understand their characters.

3rd October: 

Sonia is starting the day with doing some work with everyone on practitioners Frantic assembly 

Warmup the actors to get them ready for the day.

Change references from Venice to London

Want to get them to help devise a script with the character sheets we have.

Using the structure for the show we’ve created and the character sheets, I want to get the actors to improvise scenes for the piece so we can see what might work. 

We will also experiment with using ai to see if that can help us with the writing of the script.

4th October:

Warmed up and stretched the actors.

Went through some improvisation and focus games.

Went through the beginning of the play. Improvising new lines.

Decided the order in which people get to the party

Had a discussion on how we will do round 2 and 3.

7th October:

Update people on what they have missed

Update Hollyann on the discussions we’ve had.

Get the people who weren't in to do their introductions. The original introductions don’t sound good so we’re getting everyone to re-write them to make them sound better.

Did some patch testing.

10th October:

Came up with the idea to add a second murder victim

Try out with performing round 2

Try blocking out the scenes

Maybe try progressing through the scenes further.

11th October:

I updated Hollyann on what we had done the day before.

I went through the accusation scene with everyone who was in and went through blocking the scene with them.

We took character photos for promotional images

We worked on creating a script for the show, as it would be easier to work on the show if we had a script.

14th - 22nd October:

We worked on writing a script for the show as we decided it would be easier for everyone to work from a script.

22nd October:

The deadline for the script was today so me and Hollyann sat down for most of today to try and get the script finished. Hollyann went through and polished up the rest of the script whilst I wrote scene 6. The main thing I wanted to figure out with scene 6 was how we got the last piece of evidence. Every time we've gotten a piece of evidence so far in the script it's come quite naturally. We found the first piece of evidence on Red Cloaks body and the second piece of evidence the hare found before being killed. So I wanted us to find the last piece of evidence in a way that felt natural. 

4th November:

We had a meeting in the morning since we had just come back from the half term. I decided, after looking through the script over the half term, that some people didn't have very many lines and that it might be good to make some adjustments to the script to give those people more lines and things to do.

So I went through the script with my co-director Hollyann and came up with parts where we could put extra lines in for the dragon and the narrator. I came up with having the dragon come in with the dove when she goes for her questioning, as I thought it showed her character as being overprotective more and to also have her tell the detective that the weasel was pickpocketing him. We still have to come up with lines for the narrator, but we know where we want his lines to go and what we want him to say basically. We want the narrator to speak at the start to welcome all the guests to the party. We then want him to speak after we get the first piece of evidence to tell the audience to open their evidence packs and to tell them how long they have. We then want him to speak again after the hare has been killed to tell them to open the next evidence pack. Then we want him to speak after we get the last piece of evidence from the weasel to tell them to open their last evidence packs. Then to finish off the show we want the narrator to say thank you for watching and to have a merry Christmas.  

7th November:

We went on a theatre trip to Cirencester Barn theatre to watch Room 13.

11th November:

We started today off with having a production meeting. Charlotte Rich was chairing the meeting.

People Present: Charlotte Rich, Ryan Thornton, Hollyann Freeman, Sam Gwilliam, Josh Jarvis, Basia Klimek, Sonia Friend.

Agenda:

• Charlotte Rich has asked for a props lists, set list, hair and makeup plans, costume list, sound and lighting.

• Directors have made a point of how its unpredictable when actors are in.

• Directors made a deadline of when scenes are to be done.

• Directors want scenes blocked by Monday 18th November.

• Directors except everyone off script by the end of the month, 29th November.

• Lighting team need a print out of the script so they can do the cues for the show.

• Next Friday will be when the last orders will be place.

• Lighting design has been completed.

• Dance in the middle of scene 2 - 3 and Santa Baby will be played by the pianist. This will be completed by Fruzsina Docs, Basia Klimek and Sam Gwilliam. Phoebe Pope will be choreographing the dance.

After the meeting me and my co-director Hollyann decided that we should start with them showing me what they had done on the 8th Nov to do with the dance, as I unfortunately wasn't able to come in. They showed me the dance they had choreographed and the music they had picked for it to go with, that being a piano version of Santa Baby.  

We then decided that it would be good to start blocking out the scenes as we wanted them blocked for 18th Nov. We started off with scene 6 because it was the easiest one to block with the people we had as the scene mainly just involves 2 actors. We then moved on to block most of the scenes as it was going faster than we thought it was going to. We planned most of the blocking today because it would mean that when we come in on Thursday 14th Nov with all the HNCs we could show them what we have planned and get them to learn it. This will also help us to finish the blocking for the 18th Nov and hopefully have it all fully learnt quicker. 

Luckily Phoebe was able to come in today and help to choreograph and clean up the dance between scene 2 and 3. When the dance was initially proposed I found it funny and thought we should do it. But after thinking about how it fits in the show and from the audiences perspective, I thought the scene didn't work very well where it was as it was as originally just after Red Cloak had been murdered. I thought this would mess with the tone of the show and ruin the audiences immersion, because we go from death and everyone being shocked about it to the silliness and fun of a dance. I also thought that it wouldn't have made sense for the characters in the show to want to dance right after someone had died as it would show that they didn't care, which wouldn't make sense as right after the dance is when they start accusing each other which shows that they do care and are taking the situation more seriously. We decided that it would be better to move the dance to after the accusations and to make it the countess that gets the dove to go and dance. I feel that this fits better within the structure of the show and adds more character to the countess as it became apart of her character that she just wants her party to go well and doesn't think murder should ruin it. This has helped me bring out more of my character as well as I've made it so he confronts the countess about why she thinks it's appropriate to have a dance after someone has just died.

14th November:

We started off by telling everyone what we had planned for today. Me and Hollyann decided that it would be best if she ran through the blocking with everyone and got them up to speed with what we did on Monday and that it would be best if I went through and added the final things we wanted to add into the script. 

Ending/ Big reveal:

In my previous copy of the script I had made notes and had changed some of my lines a little bit as I felt that it helped to make the lines feel more natural and closer to what my character would say. So after I had put all the narrators lines, I went through and changed all of my lines to fit better with the adjustments I had made. One of the sections I changed the most was my confession at the end and the lines after it. Charlotte Rich made the point that the end seemed to be a bit too rushed and ended too abruptly and I agreed, so when I was going over this section I made some extensions to some lines that I thought would work better and I also added a part where the rest of the suspects react to me being revealed as the murderer. I thought it felt a bit off before that they didn't say anything or react to the big reveal. So I added it in that they all get angry and start having a go at him to show how they are feeling about the situation.

Detective Questioning:

As I was writing more of the script the idea came to my head that we should question the detective. I was going through scene 5, the second bit of questing, and saw that it felt like it went a bit too quickly. So to try and beef up the scene a bit more I thought it would be a fun idea to question the detective. My thinking was that my character would be looking for someone to pin it on, to divert attention from him and put attention onto someone else, I also thought that my character would question why there just so happened to be a detective at the party. I took the idea to my co-director Hollyann and discussed it with her. She liked the idea and said to do it. So me and Sam (the Detective) sat down together and started writing the scene. Our method for is basically just improving it. We both know our characters very well by this point and we know what we want the scene to be. So we just go back and forth riffing off of each other until we got the scene we wanted. I polished it up a bit and we came up with the idea to get the audience to ask questions as well.

15th November:

For the first part of the day we decided it would be good to do some vocal, physical and acting warmups and exercises to help us connect better with our characters. We started with a warm up lead by Phoebe followed by some stretches.  We then went on to warm up our facial muscles, vocal chords and diaphragm, to help us project. Then we finished it with some tongue twisters to help with articulation.

We then moved on and I lead the group by doing the 7 levels of tension, I had them walk around in their characters to figure out how tense they naturally would hold themselves and to help figure out how their character would walk. We then moved on to the exaggeration levels of our character, 1 being tiny movements, 10 being exaggerated to the extreme. I feel like my character wouldn't be very exaggerated. I think he would be trying to keep it all together, hiding any hint that he's the murderer, with the occasional break in the façade. I also feel like he'd find a lot of the people around him to be idiots, he wouldn't take them seriously at all. He'd have a false sense of confidence, thinking they won't be able to figure out that he was the one who did it. Which would cause him to not be particularly tense for most of it, until he's revealed at the end of course. So I'd give him a tension level of 4 for most of the show, then moving to a 6 at the end.

Later we moved back to the theatre and did a read through of the final script I had completed the day before. We decided to do it without reading the stage directions, so we could time it to see roughly how long the show may be, which came to around an hour including getting all the audience in, giving them time to look over the evidence and any breaks like that. Which is good, even though we was aiming for it to be a bit longer at 1 hour 30 minutes, I feel like 1 hour is still a good length for the show to be. I thought the read through went really well, it seemed like everyone was happy with the additions and changes I made to it. I feel the changes made, made it feel like a more complete piece and it's definitely easier to the show all coming together now.

22nd November:

Today felt like a bit of a clean up day. We all focused on different things that we needed to get done. I decided it would be best for me to spend some time learning the script, so me and Kian went off by ourselves and went through the script. Our method for learning the script may not be what's best for everyone but it works really well for us and that is basically to just keep going over it. So for when we was practising my lines Kian would be looking at the script and act as the other people in the scene and I would do my best to remember my lines. We would go over the same scenes again and again until we got all the lines perfect. I would then do the same for him.

Other people focused on other things. Josh and Spike spent the day rigging the lights, which is good and needed, it just meant that we needed to adapt when doing the run through later on as we didn't have as much space.

Emily was doing make up tests today, she took Faith and did her make up which went well.

Hollyann went off with Phoebe, Sam and Basia and they went through the dance as it's important that they are confident in the choreography for the show.

Fru and Faith also spent the day continuing with their costume construction. They had already done everyone's masks, so they worked on doing the Dragons "wings", the Countesses cape and Red Cloaks cloak.

After the break we all came back and did a semi-costume run through as not everyone had their costumes and some costumes are still not finalised. The run through went well though I feel concentration could've been better, including my own concentration. I have a tendency to try and make jokes and stuff during the run throughs, which I am going to try and improve on. I did though, feel much more confident in all of my lines, apart from my last scene as we didn't have time to go through it properly. Spending the time in the morning helped a lot.

Costume Construction:

Makeup Tests:

Rigging The Lights:

Learning The Dance:

25th November:

We're in the week before our first performance to the Level 3s so things are really starting to ramp up now. Me and Kian spent some time with Sam in the morning trying to help him learn his lines, which is really important as he is the person with the most lines so he needs to know them. When I was busy with other things later on I got Kian to go through Sam's lines with him more, just to make sure he was confident in them.

Emily was testing out hair styles today on Charlotte to see how long it would take for her hair to be done, so that we know for when they have to do it on show day.

When we was going through the run throughs Josh and Sonia watched very closely and wrote down the blocking and lighting ques. Which meant some of the rehearsal was very stop start, but that's okay as we had to get that done. We also had some people missing again today so I had to fill in for their lines, which isn't a problem but it would be better if we was able to do it with them.

Lines felt better today but some people were still struggling to remember their lines in some areas, which when we're only 11 days out from the first performance is worrying, but there's still time for people to learn their lines.

Me and Hollyann had a talk and decided to have a talk with everyone individually. This did take up quite a bit of time, but it felt like we needed to do it. Throughout the process of creating this performance there has been an underlying tone that people was unhappy with how it was going. Whether it was with how things were progressing, the story, other actors or even just that we was doing a murder mystery when they would've preferred to do something else. So I thought as directors we should hear everyone out and let them get there worries off there chests. I also wanted to talk with some of them away from everyone else and discuss how they was doing acting wise. So we brought people out one by one and just had a talk with them, I asked them what they thought of the performance and how they thought it was going. Which we had some really feedback from, people spoke about their concerns with how things were progressing and that they felt it was going too slow, they had concerns with other actors as they felt they wasn't taking thing seriously and some other things. In turn we spoke to them about some of our concerns. Things like making sure they are taking time to learn their lines, making sure they are being confident and not holding themselves back and making sure they are taking rehearsals seriously. After we had a talk with everyone I feel like we all started again being on the same page and went forward with more optimism. Personally I believe it was a bit of a turning point as everyone seemed to be having more fun with the performance, it felt like they was confident in themselves and the overall atmosphere was just much better.

2nd December:

Today was tech programming day. So we spent the first half of the day doing a run through but stopping any time Josh needed us to so he could program the lights. This was a very productive day as we was able to finish the tech programming before lunch. We also did a lot of tests with the lights, especially for the confession scene at the end.

We also finally did my hair and makeup which went very well and looking at myself in full costume with it all done, I think it fits my character incredibly well. The slick to the side hair fits in very well for the time period we're going for and my grey/ brown suit jacket works perfectly. Not only does it fit in with the colour coordination but also fits in with the tie period. 

We did have to deal with the Red Cloak situation today. Charlotte asked to meet with me, Hollyann and Josh this morning to discuss what we should do about Red Cloak. She brings this up as we had cast Will to play Red Cloak, but he's not come in again today which has become a bit of a pattern and he's not proven himself to be very reliable. There was also the issue of how we was going to get him from the lighting box to the lighting desk as the lighting desk was now down next to the stage. Originally the lighting desk was up in the lighting box so him being Red Cloak wasn't an issue because Red Cloak was going to die in the lighting box. But now that the lighting desk is next to the stage we wouldn't be able to get him to it without the audience seeing him, which would ruin the immersion. It's also more important that he focuses on the lighting operation as that's the unit he's doing for this project. So as the producer Charlotte suggested to us that we should recast him. I felt bad about doing it but it made sense to recast Red Cloak. 

We ended up asking Emily if she'd be happy to play Red Cloak for us, Which she very kindly agreed to do. Which was good as she was the only one who would be free during the performance. Everyone else was either already in the show or was doing something behind the scenes during it. Luckily Emily was doing Hair and Make up application so she was free during the performance.

5th December:

I'm really happy with how today went. We ended doing 2 full rehearsals, with full costume, hair and makeup done for both. We also had our Pianist Leon for the rehearsals, unfortunately we haven't been able to have him in much but he was absolutely amazing, slotted the music in so well with the piece. Everyone remembered their lines and stayed in character which is incredible as we have our first show tomorrow. On the tech side the Narrators voice over worked well, the lights and sounds were also on point. Apart from one point in which we had an issue with the gun shot sound effect at the end of scene 4, but that has been sorted now.

The lead up to this was quite the experience. A lot of people were worried with how it was going to turn out, though I always tried my best to stay optimistic and just create the best show I could and I think today has shown that all the hard work we all put into this has been worth it. I'd be wrong if I said it was the smoothest experience in the world creating this show. We had 12 weeks to create the show, which is very possible. Last year we put on our Halloween show in less time. But it still requires people to be focused, dedicated and to work hard, which for a while felt like we was lacking. We had issues with people missing rehearsals, not finishing work, not sharing work, people was still missing costumes a few weeks ago, people hadn't had their hair or makeup done, it taking a while for lines to be learnt and people just wasn't focused when they were in. I think in a lot of ways we were all guilty of these in one way or another and as team it's something we need to improve on going forward. Though after the talks we had with everyone last week, things got a lot better. Everyone came together and worked really hard and the show now looks really good.

Performances

Audience notes:

Evaluation

Evaluation Of The Level 3 Performance:

I thought this performance went really well. It's probably the best performance of this that we've done so far. The feedback we got from the audience was really good, they enjoyed it and a few of them managed to guess who the murderer was, which is good as it shows that the clues were there and that it came out in through the story. Everyone also managed to remember their lines and stay in character. We did have an issue where the gun shot sound effect played through the speakers on the computer rather than the main speakers, which meant we the actors couldn't hear it and had to use Phoebes scream as our cue to come out of the prop cupboard. I'm not sure how this looked for the audience but it was fine. It still worked as it was meant to, we just have to make sure this is fixed for the next performance.

I think this is also the first time we was able to properly see whether the show would work or not as none of us was able to see it from an outsiders perspective. But it seemed like everyone had a lot of fun when watching the performance, which is the best we can ask for. We had some very good feedback from our technician Spike as well. He had seen bits of the show throughout the rehearsal process but today was the first time he saw it all in it's entirety and he said it felt like an actual professional production. He's taught us all at some point over the last few years and he could see the influence from everyone and said he could see how we have all progressed and improved.

Evaluation Of The Main Performance:

Rehearsal:

Before I talk about how I thought the performance went I want to mention the rehearsal that happened before. We didn't do a full costume rehearsal, as I thought it'd would be best to do the make up and put on our costumes after we all had our break. This was mainly just so we didn't have to end up doing everyone's makeup twice and to make sure costumes didn't end up dirty before the show and the rehearsal was mainly so we could make sure everyone still remembered their lines as we hadn't performed it in 6 days. The rehearsal itself went a bit of the rails and ended up being taken less seriously. This didn't worry be so much, as everyone was still remembering their cues and lines and the energy was very high for it. I think this might just show that everyone was confident enough with the material to take it easier and have some fun with it. I know this did worry some people as they would've preferred to do a proper rehearsal where we was all being serious and looking back we probably should've made sure we could fit a serious rehearsal in there. But with how the show went I don't think it would've made much of a different as it still went really well.

Before The Show:

As we was setting up for the performance, Faith was filling up all the prop wine bottles we was using for the show. Taking them to the water fountain and putting squash in them. She ended up being told off by someone at reception, who told her to not do it as there was some governors in and it might look bad. Although I understand his point and that carrying around bottles of wine filled with squash would look bad, they were needed for the performance. It would look stupid for us to be "drinking" from wine glasses that had nothing in them. Especially when one of the characters in the show is supposed to be "drunk". I think it was unnecessary for them to say anything and that they should've understood that it was for our performance. This caused our producer Charlotte to go with Faith the next time in case anything else was said.

The Performance:

Now for the actual performance. It went great, everything went as planned for the most part, lines were remembered, people knew their cues. The energy was good, though wasn't as high as the rehearsal earlier but I think that's the nature of doing a show later in the day, we had a similar situation with our "A Mini Summer Night's Dream" performance in June as our last show that day felt like that energy wasn't as high as the previous two. I'm very happy with how the show went, I think with everything we went through to make this performance it ended up being better than a lot of people thought it was going to be. The acting on everyone's part was very good. The tech team were absolutely on it and when issues did occur they dealt with it very quickly, discreetly and professionally. The hair and make-up team did a very good job on everyone's hair and make-up and managed to get everyone done in only around an hour. It felt like everyone came together, knew what they had to do and did it very well. Making the day run very smoothly.

A few things that happened, at the start of the performance I think some people weren't projecting as good as was needed which I believed led to some audience members not being able to hear them properly. Some people weren't speaking to the audience when saying their lines and their was an issue was some peoples clarity, though for the most part this was fine. During scene 6 when the Weasel was taking everything out of his pockets that he stole, the umbrella that was taped to the inside of his jacket fell on to the fall onto the floor. This wasn't meant to happen, but it worked out massively as it ended up getting quite a laugh from the audience. 

We did have one issue with the sound this time and it wasn't to do with the gun shot. The last lines that the narrator says to basically say "thank you for watching" to the audience was played too late, this cause the actors to assume that maybe they had an issue with it and go straight into the bows, which they're normally meant to do after that line is said. This then cause another issue as the line started playing as the actors were doing their bows and the tech team had to quickly stop the line. I'm not sure how this looked to the audience as I was outside the room for some of this, after just being taken away as the murderer, though I believe it didn't cause too much of an issue and the line was played after the actors did the bows instead.

There was one thing I did during the performance that I was personally praised for that I didn't even realise was that big of thing before hand. This was in scene 5 when I was questioning the detective with the audience, at the end of my scene when I was going back to the table I took a bottle from the interrogation table with me. This was left there because Phoebes character had it with her when being questioned during the previous scene and she forgot to take it with her when she went off stage. I instinctually took it off with me as I knew it wasn't supposed to be there, but I didn't really think about it in the moment.

Another thing that happened during my questioning of the Detective was that at the end Fru spoke up in character and asked to ask the Detective whether he committed the murders. This was not how it was meant to go as I was supposed to be the one to ask the Detective that. She did this because she felt the scene was running on a bit long and that the audience was getting bored of it. Which is true, I do agree with that. The thing is though, I knew that in the moment too and I was just about to say that line before she spoke up. This did throw me off for just a second, but I quickly went with it and the line to the line as intended. I understand why she did it and despite it being different from what was planned it still looked good from the audiences perspective. Part of me thinks it might've been more impactful if she hadn't spoke up and the scene went as planned. 

Commission:

We were commissioned by Gloucester welcomes refugees to put on this murder mystery show and we have successfully done that. I think according to Stanker we managed to sell 38 tickets on event bright which results in £380 raised for the charity. Though we did take a few sales at the door so we could have raised around £400. This is very good and around twice as much as we raised for them last year with the Halloween show. Though it still didn't manage to raise more than the last murder mystery as that raised around £600. Despite that I am still proud of the amount of money we did raise.

Evaluation Of My Directing:

This production felt like it went on forever but was over really quickly and I think a reason for that is that it took us a while to properly get in the groove of things. I found this show to be very difficult to envision at the start. Normally when I've directed stuff in the past, whether it was a film, music video or theatre piece, I could visualise how I wanted it to go and that would help influence how I went about directing it. This time however it was more difficult to visualise the show. A reason for this is that we didn't have a lot to work with and it definitely didn't help that it took us a while to finalise the script. With us not having a script for a while it was hard to know what we should get the actors to do during their sessions. At the start we did a lot of work on commissioners like Stanislavski, commedia dell'arte, Complicite, Jacques Lecoq and others to get them ready for when we had the script and so they could start to create their characters. 

Eventually we made the decision it would be best if we focused as much as we could on getting a finished script and once we had that things definitely went smoother. During the process of writing the script however, we didn't have anything for the actors to really do, a few of them helped come up with things for the script but the rest were sort of left to do their own thing. Which ended up not being good as it gave the impression that we didn't know what we was doing. For some of it we didn't know what we was doing and we should have planned things out better. But a lot of it was just that we didn't have script yet so couldn't really do anything. 

We had to take some time writing the script so we could start working on rehearsing scenes and then we had to take more time for the script to be rewritten to properly start going for it. The problem this created, was that during this time we didn't have a lot for people to do, which caused the opinions towards to show to become more and more negative. So by the time we got the final script and started doing proper rehearsals, people were mentally checking out and not putting their all towards the performance. And as the co-director I could feel that people didn't have much hope for the performance and I felt like I was letting them down and not doing a good enough job. Despite this I tried my best to stay as optimistic as possible about it all and always look on the bright side, cause I knew once I started to show signs of thinking the show wasn't going to go very well then everyone else would lose hope as well. In the end I think we managed to get everyone to come together and I think we managed to make a pretty good show.

As for my own directing abilities I think I did quite well despite the issues. From some of the feedback I had from some of the actors they appreciated that I was approachable and that they felt like they were able to say their opinions without judgement. They were also confident when it came to coming to me with ideas they had for the show. Some ideas I had to turn down lightly and explain why we couldn't do that, but some of their ideas actually ended up being used in the show and helped to make it better in my opinion. The idea of having a second murder came from Kian which ended up being a key moment during the show. The Countesses breakdown after the second murder was an idea Faith had as she felt like her character would go off on one at that moment and I think it worked really well. A lot of people had different ideas for how what their characters would say for certain lines and they ended up working very well. So overall I feel that being approachable and listening to others ideas helped to make this show a better one than it could've been if I had just gone with the ideas I had.

The next show we are doing will come with a script already completed, so I'm hoping this will help with some of the issues that came from this production. But for me and Hollyann to take full advantage of having an already written script we've got to start preparing early and have a plan going into it. I'm hoping this will give people more confidence in our abilities and help the process go more smoothly. I hope to go forward learning from the mistakes made this time round and make the next one even better.

Directors Feedback To The Costume Department:

"The Dragons red dress I thought was done brilliantly and very professionally. The colour scheme with the red representing the dragon, yet also love and passion fits the Dragons character perfectly. The “wings” sewed onto the dress is a really effective and subtle way to bring the dress closer to resembling a dragon. I thought the dress also fit the setting of the show, that being a 1920s masquerade ball. Looking at parties that took place in the 1920s, all the women seem to be wearing quite elaborate and flashy dresses, while the men wear suits. I think the costume department has done a very good job with everyone's costumes, despite our small budget, to try and best represent that 1920s era of fashion. Everyone's costumes along with fitting into the setting of the show also fit the characters very well, no one was wearing something that would seem out of place for them and the colour coordination with the characters was very effective. Having the bluebird wear blue, the dove wear white, the stag wear brown/ grey, the dragon wear red etc. Was really effective at distinguishing the characters from each other, which should’ve helped the audience even more when it came to figuring out the characters and who committed the murder in the show. The masks everyone was wearing were good and were effective in showing which character they were masquerading as. With a higher budget or more time I think the masks could’ve been better, but we’ve got to work with what we have and considering that, they were very good. The masks being inconsistent from each other wasn’t a big issue, but I think having a group of them be in the same “realistic” style and others not, just stood out a bit too much. I think If the masks were either all the same style or all mostly different styles then that could’ve worked better. Considering we set the show in the 1920s, I think a lot of the masks worked very well. I don’t think the “realistic” masks would’ve fit into the 1920s and if we were to do it again I’d see if we could change them. Though I understand we needed specific animal masks and that it’s quite difficult to find masks that would suit the 1920s and be the correct animals. If we had more time then we maybe could have attempted to make the masks ourselves. Overall I think all the costumes and most of the masks fit into the show we were creating and I think the costume department did an amazing job, despite the limitations of time and a small budget." - Ryan Thornton.

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