Pod – Teachers’ Notes Overview The play Pod explores the nature of youth, illusion and reality, the purpose of theatre as well as the pressure young people are under in the twenty fi rst century. It also provides us with the opportunity to explore the relationship between what happens on stage and what happens in the auditorium. In fact, this is the basis of all drama, whether it is conveyed through naturalistic or non-naturalistic techniques. The play intertwines elements of Brechtian Theatre, Poor Theatre and 4D Cinema with Modern Realism acting style. It contains metadrama and the use of visual arts and music to underscore what happens to the characters. Brecht Theatre There are strong elements of Brecht’s work in this play. Despite this, it doesn’t contain any didactic acting or preaching and it should be ensured that the performances are credible and very real. The strength of Brecht’s work is his talent to create emotional scenes and then shattering the fourth wall all of a sudden in order to shock the audience through the use of verfremdungseff ekt (alienation eff ect). If the acting is too superfi cial then this response isn’t achieved. The use of this eff ect was clearly seen in the National Theatre’s production of Mother Courage with Fiona Shaw in the title role. The performances were raw and that added further power to those instances where you get direct addressing of the audience, live singing and the use of placards. Pupils may be able to think of a Brechtian work they have seen and how the audience was drawn into the centre of action only to be thrown by the use of non-naturalistic technique in order to give them the opportunity to think about what they had just seen / felt. Pupils can explore the process of creating a highly credible scene and then shattering the fourth wall at a key moment / climax and observing and discussing the eff ect upon the actors and upon the audience in comparison with the eff ect of seeing a piece of pure naturalistic theatre. Pod – Teachers’ Notes | 1 Poor Theatre Elements of Poor Theatre can be seen in the set. Two or three chairs represent the study room and an instrument stand is added to represent the music rehearsal room. The director Grotowski believed that the actors’ performances were of the greatest importance and that a simple minimalist set was suffi cient to create a location. In this play the power arises from the interplay between the characters. Pupils can study photographs of the National Theatre’s production of War Horse to see a contemporary example of Poor Theatre – a door frame representing a farmhouse, barbed wire representing trenches in France. In War Horse, emotion and reality are added by the use of a musical score, lighting and highly atmospheric sound. With Pod the playwright also uses sound and lighting to create emotion on a minimalist stage: Callum is seen standing in front of the backcloth lighted up by the colours of the picture as he shares the truth about his mother with Liam. Elgar’s score creates a background to the words thus adding to the emotion. The pupils could choose three key moments and stage them by creating detailed lighting (including backcloth) and sound schemes. The cello plays a key part in the play. Once again this is an excellent opportunity for pupils to experiment with designing set and props. As the rest of the set style is Poor Theatre there is no need for a real cello. A slim wooden frame could represent the instrument. More than one cello frame could be made with one of them resembling Munch’s picture, The Scream. Once again, they should look at the horses in War Horse and at how Poor Theatre style, strong acting and appropriate technical elements can have a powerful eff ect upon an audience. 4D Cinema The play pushes the boundaries by exploring the use of smell in the auditorium. The playwright suggests that the space should be fi lled with the smell of petrol in the last scene in order to strengthen the eff ect of what Lowri’s character does. A number of playwrights and theatre practitioners have explored this possibility: the theatre practitioner Artaud is an excellent example to study as he strongly believes that a good piece of theatre should fulfi l all fi ve senses, and not only the audio and visual. We could also observe the work of the following theatre companies: Complicité, Tobacco Factory and Volcano. 2 | Pod – Teachers’ Notes Modern Realism Although the above elements suggest an non-naturalistic theatre style it is extremely important that the performances are in the style of Modern Realism. Pupils could look at examples of productions of Simon Stephens’ work such as Motortown or Harper Regan. The acting is very convincing, sometimes bordering on Uber Realism. It would be interesting for pupils to experiment with both these techniques as they stage their scenes. During the rehearsal process they could use the techniques of Stanislavski, Michael Chekhov and Meisner to ensure the full reality of the piece. It would be interesting to discuss how an actor such as Daniel Day-Lewis prepares to play a very emotional role. Synopsis and Theme Notes Act One Scene 1 The play opens with Liam addressing the audience. He talks about the structure of Elgar’s concerto and this establishes two motifs, fi rstly the relationship between character and audience and then the use of music and art to explore sub-text and emotion within the play. The use of Brecht’s technique of directly addressing the audience is clearly seen. The playwright’s intention isn’t to create pure verfremdungseff ekt but rather to make sure that members of the audience are aware that they are part of the action from the outset. Then we see Callum and Lowri in the Study Room. In this scene we see how the common-place and the extreme are intertwined in the lives of the young. On the face of it, Lowri’s main concern is to make sure that she gains an ‘A’ grade for her English coursework. Then Callum tells his lie about his mother and father’s ‘death’ on the A470. The details about chicken manure and the Danish driver add an element of both validity and absurdness to his story. Lowri soon realises that he is lying. This is an important theme in the play: the way young people sometimes use lies to convey emotion. Increasingly we see the young in our society creating an illusion of pain because facing Pod – Teachers’ Notes | 3 up to real pain is too hard. In creating an illusion, it becomes possible to convey feelings without having to confess the dreadfulness of the situation. Who knows what was taking place in Callum’s life that day? He doesn’t discuss it. All he can do is to create an illusion which corresponds to the pain he feels. That is how Callum deals with his diffi cult life. We see this a number of times in the play e.g. the cello and the chemo. Pupils could work on Callum’s background story in order to try and discover why he can’t tell the truth about his mother; why he creates all these lies. They could look at social platforms and consider the level of truth / illusion that is to be found in their use. We also fi nd another motif in this scene, which is literature – the Jewish author Primo Levi is referred to and we also hear references to historical events, such as the death of JFK, which are to be found here and there throughout the play. We return to Levi’s work later on in the play. Pupils could take a quick look at his work on the grey zone: it is a good introduction to a piece of work on devised theatre or character. It is in this scene that we see violence for the fi rst time in the play. It is important that Lowri’s violent act comes out of nowhere and without warning. This tendency should be a very natural element of her character. It is only later on that we learn that violence is an integral part of her home life. After the violent act we return to ordinary matters during the conversations: course work, submission dates, teachers and so on. This is an important element in the play, and indeed, in modern life: our ability to live in the extreme and the ordinary at the same time. In this scene we are only given a suggestion of Lowri’s real problems, and Callum appears to be an immature, attention seeking character: a bit of a geek perhaps. Scene 2 We meet Bronwyn. She speaks directly to the audience, which touches the very nature of this play. The scene strengthens the use of the Brechtian technique of making the audience aware that they are seeing a play and that some of the characters are aware that they are presenting a story / play, and not real life. In her speech Bronwyn doesn’t mince her words in dealing with the disasters of the twenty fi rst century. Pupils could discuss the relationship between the audience and a piece of theatre and look at the work of practitioners on the syllabus. The start of this process can be seen when Bronwyn leads us through the emotions / 4 | Pod – Teachers’ Notes sub-text of the play through the use of a suitable piece of art.