We performed our political protest in the foyer and set up our space so that we had a board of posters, with statistics and facts, on the wall behind the tory tuck shop. The tory tuck shop was a table with medicines, bandages and blood donors on it, with signs and offers such as ' tory cut special offer' on them. I was the conservative representative who was in charge of the tuck shop, trying to persuade people to buy medicine at extortionately high prices, to make up for the cuts that have been made. I gave people the excuse for the cuts as 'David Cameron needing his holiday this year!' Whilst I tried to con people into buying the medicine, the other people in my group acted as beggars, who were actually supposed to be doctors and nurses, but because of redundancy, salary cuts and budgets being slashed, they had resorted to begging from members of the public. When Sidonie came, having a fit and needing urgent medical attention, the beggars tried to help her by coming to me and trying to get me to give them things with the small amount of money they had raised. I refused saying that the NHS budget wouldn't allow for things to be given away, even if it was an emergency and I tried to clear Sidonie out the way because it would be 'bad press' for the conservatives.
The strengths were that people gave us money because the doctors, who were begging, argued the case strongly enough that the audience felt they should donate. Many members of the audience were intrigued by the tory tuck shop and stopped to listen. They also questioned and argued with the points I was making from a conservative point of view, which is good because the purpose of Brechtian theatre is to get people to question. When we rehearsed we made sure that we had lots of material that lasted about five minutes and that we could repeat. We worked out a smooth way to reset, which was subtle and didn't ruin the piece. I felt confident with the statistics and facts, because I had done my research and I could give proof to back up my answers if anyone questioned me. There was always a crowd and we never had a dead moment, when no one was watching us. The large crowd gave me energy and motivated me to get my argument across.
I felt that there were a lot of elements that we could have improved on if we had rehearsed for longer and had more time to try out different ideas. There were also things that we hadn't accounted for, such as there being a huge crowd, constantly streaming through the foyer. this meant that it was very noisy and even when I projected my voice, it was very hard to be heard. I ended up shouting to be heard above the crowd, which meant that I was damaging my voice and it was very painful for the rest of the day. At some points the doctors, who were walking around in the crowd, were very far away from the tuck shop, which meant it was unclear that they were part of the same performance. We didn't get the space we originally wanted, which was to have it in front of the window on the right side of the doors. We wanted this space because we could put posters up in the window and they would have been the main focus, however we got a space with a wall that already had lots of the school's posters on it, which meant our's weren't the main focus. We were doing the same material over and over again in half an hour, so towards the end it was hard to keep the momentum up.
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