In our opening we set it up so that the Pig (soon to be
known as Mr Peter Pig) would be our antagonist and the Wolf would be our
mistaken hero, so we wanted to explore the reasons behind why one of the three
little pigs was less innocent as portrayed in the original fairytale. This gave
us the perfect opportunity to include the “Big Bad Wolf”.
We set up the scene with Mr Pig speaking to his therapist
about the nightmare of the Wolf blowing down the houses and this leads him to remember
where it all began, in the Wendy House at school. We then transitioned from the
therapy into a flashback of Mr Pig at school, and we experimented with using
physical theatre by Sam and I taking shape of the Wendy House and creating the
sounds of the door creaking opening. While choreographing this movement we
consulted a second year to get their opinion as we didn’t want the miming of
the door opening to look silly. The main point we had to focus on was that the
door must be opened and closed at the same height and you have to approach the
miming action as if you are opening a real door. This meant that Matt had to
ensure that when he was closing the door he was reaching for where the “handle”
would have been. This delivery of the movement was important to learn because
when the Wolf goes to open the door to tease Mr Pig we had to ensure that Luke
was reaching for the door at the same position that Matt had.
As our idea had now shaped to be that Mr Pig was responsible
for the Wolf being perceived to be big and bad we wanted this scene to show
what had happened in his past to result in his hatred of the Wolf. By setting
this scene in school we hoped that our audience would be able to relate to the
playground teasing that occurs and that it would be an understandable way to
show why the Pig disliked the Wolf as we didn’t want to overcomplicate things. We
decided to have the Wolf and two friends tease Mr Pig and this allowed us to
use the quotation “Little pig. Little pig.
Let me in!” as well as referencing the Pig’s “hairy, chinny chin chin”.
Both of which would be recognisable to our child audience and so they would be
able to establish who the characters are. One of the first things about Theatre
for Children that we learnt was that children are not stupid and that you don’t
need to spoon feed them, they are observant enough to get the references we
give them.
The intention of this scene was to show why Mr Pig disliked
the Wolf and how this has affected him into adulthood and shrouded his opinion.
Having devised a two minute scene we then met up with the
rest of the groups and performed to one another:
After our performance we received some feedback both from
Ella and our peers. People commented on how they liked the Pig character that
Matt had developed and liked the transition he made between Mr Pig and child
Pig. Ella said that we needed less emphasis on the role of the therapist as the
humour that we went about creating with lines such as “And how does that make
you feel?” which are often said when poking fun at therapists would go over the
heads of the children. We were told that it would work better if the person
that Mr Pig was talking to was a friend rather than someone from a professional
background. Another piece of feedback we were given was that rather than having
the Wolf bring along two friends it should be the Pig’s two siblings and so
this would give him more of a motive to frame the Wolf for the misdeeds within
the woods.
With this feedback it meant we were able to go away and work
on this scene and further develop the storyline but incorporating the two pig
siblings bullying their brother.
The Wendy House on tour!
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