This scene I wrote after the 2nd stumble through in Jonathans' lesson, which I shall evaluate when I've seen the video.
I asked the group if they would mind me attempting to write a scene that linked the first meeting dance to Alfie being drafted to war.
We had tried to write a scene that morning, yet we kept reaching a block, we knew we wanted the couple to go on a walk home from the dance, and to show time passing, yet we didn't want to make it corny that it was too 'like the films' that would led to possibly pushing the audience away instead of drawing them in.
The walk home was relatively easy to write, keeping it short, punctuated by awkward moments and slick moves by Alfie, leaving his coat with Evie to collect it the following day so he could see her again. There weren't any chick flick movie quotes, but trying to stay as truthful to a real life scenario as this as possible.
Again in Frantic's 'Lovesong' the couple have a scene where they are sitting as if they're underneath a tree, just chatting about life. I took this as inspiration and got the walk home to end with the couple not wanting the night to end and walking to sit underneath a tree. There they paused, and I got the Old Evie to have dialogue where she describes what happened, that they visited that tree every Sunday afternoon, signalling months have passed yet they always came back to the same place. Having Old Evie speak this added in the interlinking of the old and young, as well as keeping with this thinking back to memories and enjoying them, wanting to remember them.
I then got the script from the beginning of the play, where the old couple speak 'when people ask us how we met' dialogue. I thought the young couple could repeat this dialogue, slightly altered, when they are under the tree as months had passed. This dialogue again repeats at the end, so you get to see it spoken three different times, each having a slightly different meaning and intention, in three different time periods, where different events have happened.
At the end I added the lines 'Yes...it is a great story isn't it? 'One we'll never forget.' 'Oh no, one we'll never forget'. To have the audience witness the couple say those lines, almost like a promise to each other, and knowing that for one of them, as much as they want to remember, their body/mind wouldn't let them would hopefully giving them an urgency and empathy for Old Evie to remember her past. It would be nice to have the audience really get that emotional connection with Evie and Alfie, seeing their younger selves completely oblivious to what would happen, yet the audience already knows. Whenever I watched plays or films, knowing what the ending/future was of characters before they did gave you a certain feeling you couldn't otherwise get, you know what is to come, but you have to sit and watch it unfold before you.
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