Scene 4 - The beach
Scene 4 is where Mau and Daphne meet for the first time. They struggle to understand each other and Daphne is wary of Mau. She gets frightened and produces a gun. She fires at him, but the gun hasn't got any bullets. They recover from the incident and Daphne apologies. She invites him for tea on the ship wreck.
For this scene I thought that Daphne would walk through the audience, who would be sitting in traverse, and stop half way to observe Mau. Daphne speaks quietly to Milton about the boy she can see one the beach. When Mau, who will be on the stage, sees Daphne she can walk up there to be able to talk to him. They will have their interaction up on the stage, which will represent the beach. In the middle of the scene the stage direction says 'Mau stamps the ground in a ritual war chant and then charges forward', this will scare Daphne so both of them will run down off the stage and back into the audience. This will be when Daphne tries to shoot him, so she could get an every day object, such as an umbrella, off an audience member and use it as the gun. After the shooting, they will continue their interaction among the audience, until Daphne and Milton exit. At the end of the scene Mau talks to the grandfathers, who could be in the orchestra pit.
In our group we made a diagram of the stage and plotted the positions of the characters during the scene...
Nation is about a young girl, from Wiltshire, who finds herself washed up on an island called Polynesia, after being in a tsunami on the way to visiting her father.No one who was on the ship survived, so the girl is left alone. However she finds a boy on the island and meets his people. They form a strong friendship and together lead the Nation.
The story of Nation is very spiritual. It includes elements of religion and science, and doesn't say that either one is right or wrong. The play is set in the Victorian era, but is ahead of its time because it has a female character who is very interested in the sciences, which was unusual for the time. In the play there is a lot of interaction with animals and nature is a big part of the story. Nature has power over the people, they cant fight natural disasters such as the tsunami. The play shows the contrast between two very different cultures, but it proves that people, however different, are able to unite and come together.
When I first read the script I began to see that the dialogue between Mau and Daphne will be hard to execute in an effective way. When they first meet each other,they cant understand the others's language, but in the script they are both speaking English. When we devise this scene we will have to make it clear to the audience that they are supposed to be speaking different languages, by both actors using mime and finding creative and effective ways to show the audience their confusion and difficulty understanding each other.
I also thought that the character Milton, who is a bird, could be a puppet. He has a lot of lines and is in many of the scenes, so the puppeteer could also be the voice of Milton, as well as controlling him. There is a balcony in the space where we will perform, so Milton will be able to fly down off the balcony, into the audience.
