The story within 'Find Me' follows the story of the girl Verity Taylor who was admitted to Broadmoor hospital after reoccurring acts or tantrums that became uncontrollable. To fit this into the play, we decided that the first half (my half) would create the background stories that progressive lead up to the second cast, which show reasons and answers to Verity's behaviour and the consequential effects that has on the ending of Verity's life.
Character Workshop:
Group: Verity's cause for being institutionalised was breaking and setting fire to a chair. The first activity we did was to create 4 freeze frames, for my group it was the idea of what happened before she was placed in the institution. We started by having Verity ignored at the dining table, then moving into her brother and father dragging her on the floor, this then moved into the mother showing desperation into wanting her to be helped, or to become 'normal' and the fourth was the mother being pushed out and verity's head being pushed into a bath.
We then joined with the other group who worked on what happened to Verity in her time in the institution which consisted of her being raped by a doctor. We were asked to merge the two images, by this we brought in the idea of 'duality' through this we had two Verity's - Abbie and Emily. We made it so that everyone else was a doctor, and through this we could adapt the mother to being a doctor that actually wanted to help and support, but there were restrictions to this. We liked this idea of physical theatre were Verity had no control over the constant analytical pressure she was under and how this might of effected her suicidal ending.
Individual: Mr Chipp asked us all to lay down and think of a time when you lost control, he then asked us a series of questions that made us develop why we lost control and if we right in that. He then put a chair in the centre of the space, he told us to one at a time come and sit in the chair, from this, he would then ask us a series of questions. The questions had a strong connection to Verity's home life, and in the way they would have dealt with the issue of the broken chair. There was an apprehensive nature to sit on the chair within the group perhaps because we were unaware of how the activity would play out. Sirs tone of questioning changed with each person, focusing on a different aspect, and it was through this that were able to see a variety of ways that doctors or family may have handled the situation. As we all had the emotions within us, when Mr Chipp was asking Matt the questions we all became emotional and they made us feel the guilt and the unknowing nature of the lack of control. From this we felt the three main points were medication, entrapment and blame.
The idea of medication felt like a way of placing help that should maybe have come from family members with verbal support was being subsidised for drugs that only temporarily become the solution and can be done forcefully. The idea of locking the patients with mental health in an institution raised the point that being removed from society hindered them from making progression to achieving a 'normal' lifestyle, and through this their mental health might actually deteriorate due to the confined space and lack of emotion connections that would be able to make within the hospital.
Through this we saw entrapment, this idea of being imprisoned physically, mentally and emotionally. By linking to our emotions we felt that loosing control was breaking free from this feeling of being trapped, linking to why Verity might have broke the chair. It is through this we saw the possibility of negative affects the restraining nature of the hospital might have on her as being trapped may only cause her to feel more enclosed resulting in more moments where she feels she must loose control and consequently cause damage. This is because she feels mental imprisonment and her inability to get better whilst in the hospital. Using the hospital itself is a physical place where she cannot escape, and we wanted to reflect this nature in our piece, which felt right when the architecture of our school was actually similar to those of prisons.
Blame is also a running theme, the parents act as if Verity is the only one to blame which is why they remove responibility completely by putting her into Broadmoor. Verity often finds any opportunity to place the blame onto other people but what we find interesting if there was an aspect of her that knew she was partly to blame.
Site Exploration:
While walking around the school we identified various amounts of places that we thought were interest, we knew we wanted to use a staircase but we didn't know which would be best, after moving around the school we realised that staircase 2 would be best as it is the most enclosed and dark staircase from where it is situated, as it is near to the entrance of the school building meaning it wouldn't be a far walk for the audience. We liked the space outside of the music department as it had a 'crossroad' feel, applying to the start of Verity's time and the number of directions in which her mental health could've gone. We decided to then use the main staircase in order to transition with the next cast as it allowed the next cast to get there as well as being an accessible point to go to the next place within school. It became apparent that we now had places that we had a clear connection with, it was now the characters within the story that needed development. For this we did workshop.
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