Documentary Response 1
1. My group and I managed to present Mr Kipps' speech with contrasting moods to symbolise the difference between the scarred and anxious Arthur narrating, and the calm, loving front he puts on for his family. This contrast was really shown when Lewis [as Mr Kipps] is told by the children that he has to participate in the ghost story-telling; his facial expression goes from calm and content to dread, anxiety and terror. This shows that his past experiences haunts him even more than The Woman did, because we expressed in our piece that even the thought of bringing back the past through story telling was a horrible concept. Everything in the scenes orbited around Arthur, yet everyone was still oblivious of his extremes discomfort in this particular situation.

2 I think Steven Mallatratt decided to have this fast paced, tension filled speech at the very beginning of the play so the audience would be gripped onto what the back story was to the speech. They'd be hooked in why Arthur was so tense, so scared of only a ghost story. This would make the audience want to watch the play unfold, so they would be able to fully understand the speech; so they would get a lengthy explanation as to why Arthur was so jumpy and nervous. At the beginning of the play, the characters are only just being introduced to the audience, so we know nothing at all about them at the time of the speech. Having this long introductory, extremely descriptive speech at the very beginning of Arthur's character development makes us want to know more. Mallatratt chose a good placement.

3. Devising and performing two contrasting images helped our groups ne'er standing of Arthur's character, I think. Our group showed the contrast with both scenes; we did this in the first scene by having Mr Kipps as a central piece, with The Woman standing directly above him, and we used the spare actors to cling onto his limp, almost lifeless body which drooped to the floor. This helped us understand that with his story still bottled up inside of him, he's never going to be able to let The Woman go, he's never going to be able to stop her from haunting him. The scone image contrasts because he is shown love and support for telling his story; for letting her go. We showed this in the movement of transaction between images, the actors who were clinging desperately to him in the first scene, now helped him up and moved into a hug, or a reassuring pat. The Woman had turned her face away from Mr Kipps and took several steps away. This helped understand that if Arthur shared his experience, he would be able to let the past stay in the past, and let his family and friends show him support.

Documentary Response 2:
4. All throughout the script, anyone could tell that all of the characters were hiding something, withholding information of some sort from Mr Kipps. It was a frustrating ordeal, having to read between the lines of whatever the citizens told him and try trying to figure out what was happening. By half way through the script, we knew that The Woman was terrifying locals, and nearing the end of the play, we discovered that the ghost of Jennette was taking children's lives because her own child had had his life taken when she was alive. No one wanted to speak of her, in case they summoned the spirit. I think that our own group showed this lack of communication between the characters by voicing the frustrated thoughts of Mr Kipps and the Landlord. The things they'd never say, but the other always knew they were thinking it. At one point, the characters became random customers and the thoughts took centre stage. They talked to each other, yet it wasn't a conversation; Mr Kipps' thoughts would plead [angrily] for information, with an expression of confused desperation, but over the table, the Landlord was almost completely unresponsive, and an air of slyness hung around him. But it was an uncomfortable silence, slyness, he kept of shifting and moving, seeming as if he wanted to leave. His answers wore short and repetitive, even his thoughts were minimal; he didn't want to give anything away.

Documentary Response 3:
5. Our group managed to use volume, hidden sound, lighting and an anti-climax in an effective way in the scene we produced. Confusion was our main theme, and we made it in this by making Jack shaky in his stance and not giving him direction around the stage, therefore he ended up sleepily stumbling around, portraying confusion because the whole theatre was plunged into darkness for our performance. The only light was from Jack's wobbly torch, which jumped about the audience in a nervous manner at every little sound or slight movement. To add even more confusion, we dotted three members of our cast about the edge of the audience and had them shouting chilling phrases from Jennette's speech, spitting the words out like angry, roaring fire by the end of the chant, but starting with a soft, eerie voice, and then building it up. This confused the audience because in the darkness, you felt like the noise was coking from all around and there wasn't a focal point, so the audience didn't know where to look.

Documentary Response 4:
6. In our representation of the nightmare scene, we had Lucy as a centrepiece; Mr Kipps, raised on two blocks that made a makeshift bed, and the remainder of the cast had veils draped over their faces and were dressed as The Woman. Because there were multiple versions of The Woman, it shows that The Woman is in every little bit of Mr Kipps' life, she's everywhere. The multiple versions of The Woman begin to move in, slowly, with jerky, clockwork-like steps, and a drooping stance in the upper body. Each of the cast begin chanting as they walk forwards, some with freakish desperation; "I'll kill us both before I let him go," or scary, roaring anger; "He will never, never, never be yours!". The volume dramatically raised the closer the versions get to Lucy/Mr Kipps, and they eventually ended up bent over her, almost screaming at a very disgruntled, fidgety and whimpering Lucy. The scene ends with Lucy sitting up adeptly and yelling "Stella!" at the top of her voice. My contribution was the ending, where Lucy screamed for Stella. I think this helped the group performance because it ended on a dramatic high.

7. In terms of other groups, I thought that Maddy's group was the most effective. This was because they used a mixture of stylisation and naturalism in their performance. For example, they used a naturalistic style when Fergal and Lily were shown walking Nils though a park of some sort, as a family, but they quickly changed to stylistic when Fergal and Lily let go of their child [Nils] and he stepped over the gauze which Maddy and Holly were holding up, into a nightmare/alternate reality/dream land on his own. He got wrapped up in the gauze, and twisted into the dream state and it was creepy and eerie in a brilliant stylistic and lost way. Sound-wise, the group very cleverly made a wise choice in using a creepy child-like music box song, and Maddy and Holly also added another childish, eerie sound effect when they began to giggle in a high pitch and dance around Nils in a Mayfair fashion with the gauze. This caused Nils [representing Mr Kipps' child possibly?] to become tangled up and confused, disorientated in the gauze, in the dreamland, which symbolised how The Woman took children.