Blocking Love Letters

This was the scene was one of the longest to create and finalize in the devising process.
A group had tried working around ideas and the initial idea was that Alfie and Evie would be on either sides of the stage, reading fragments of their letters to one another, then the librarians, who at that moment were antagonists, would grab the letters, almost mock them and throw them around the set. The problems were that the words were not scripted, so improvising we found ourselves repeating many things and there wasn't a huge structure.
As the librarians role completely changed in the piece, where their roles as being evil and causing the bad events in the story were removed turned to being keepers of memories and delighting in them, the mood of this section was able to change.
We began with the middle bookcase as a prop to split the stage in two, Evie on one and Alfie on the other, the bookcase then gave us two separate locations. We hadn't got set script yet, so we thought of ways that letters could be passed through the bookcase, using the different shelves, putting them in books as they were passed, pushing them off the top shelf so they floated down to the other's feet. That evening I said I would be happy to try and write two letters, one for Alfie and one for Evie.
Megan a couple of weeks ago had printed off real letters that had been written by couples throughout WW2. Instead of having to try and think of new dialogue, and considering the letters were so eloquently written, I pulled together all the letters and highlighted the fragments and sentences that were fitting. One colour for Alfie and one for Evie, before ordering the sentences into some order that made sense. The letters needed to have a light-hearted sense to them, because they were the only points of contact for people, so you would want to be both reassuring but take such joy in writing and reading them. They were what kept many people going, so really portraying that joyfulness as we read them out was needed.
When we came to adding the dialogue, the monologues were extremely long, so some parts were cut down to speed them up! As well as this, we mixed the old and young characters together, sharing lines and crossing them over, as it's the first time you see all four characters on stage together. It is also a nice image and sound to hear the two generations speaking together. There was then some shared dialogue between Alfie and Evie, and when we tried passing the letters each time with movement, it became static and there were too many pauses which broke up the dialogue too much and there wasn't a chance to build up pace. There was also another issue of trying to involve the librarians more, so we put Alfie and Evie more downstage with older Alfie and Evie upstage and the librarians passing the letters around. It gave them a purpose to be transporting the letters and meant that the dialogue could be spoken without having to be punctuated with extra movement. Visually as well, its a lovely image of all six main characters on stage at the same time.
The issues we kept facing were the pace, it's such a wordy scene that it needs momentum to drive to dialogue forwards. Keeping the monologues too slow would have the potential to disengage the audience, as well as the shared dialogue after. We needed to play with our tones, straying away from monotonous, keeping playful and our voices uplifted. After the monologues there needed to be another wave of energy for the shared dialogue, so missing out those pauses at the end of Evie's monologue and going straight into the shared, bouncing off each other's words to again keep a certain uplifting mood, not pre-empting that something was going to happen to Alfie.
It was a constant issue that we still had to overcome throughout the tour, but with each time we performed it, driving the momentum did get easier and we managed to do it better each time.