Abi Morgan:
Upon heavy research, not much information is circulating as to what Abi Morgan thought about refugees and her relationship with them in the past. However it would be safe to say that she must have met a good few when she moved to 7 different school as a child because of her mother constantly looking for acting jobs in different towns. Therefore she must have encountered several kids of the calibur of those in the play and observed their way of going about their daily lives, whether it was bullying to trouble studying a foreign language.
Who are we performing to?
The audience we will perform to will be other students from around the college doing performing arts courses and also out of school friends if they would like to watch us perform. This could mean that language should be slightly changed in some scenes to suit the audience and help them understand what is going on. For example, modern slang could be used in some scenes so that some of the members of the audience have a better understanding of what is going on as from observation many students in the college do not have very good grammar and do have tendencies to talk proper English. We are also performing to an audience who will be sitting on one side like a Proscenium stage. This would mean we will need to make sure that we are not blocking one another on stage during rehearsals and to keep our best interests on the audience.
Where are we as actors?
As actors we have all come quite far as individuals and as an ensemble. At the beginning of the year we were all very shy to speak to one another and each of us was quite frankly scared of judgement from the others. We have now established a good foundation and trust as a team and we have all climbed out of our shells too and become quite confident to perform in front of one another, though there are still some people who are still slowly climbing out their shells so I have found that everyone goes at a different pace to one another. Considering this factor, when we went through the casting stages people got certain characters based off of their abilities to work as an ensemble and whether their attendance was better than others as that is quite important in all corners of life. I ended up getting my role as Cheung as my attendance was one of the highest in the year and that my ability to work in the ensemble was great.
Themes:
The themes which we have observed in Fugee are:
Rejection: In that many Refugees were not accepted because they didn't look a certain age
Communication: Throughout the play we scene that people have trouble understanding one another as everyone comes from different backgrounds. There is also a language barrier which needs to be breached in order to communicate with the teenagers by translators
Acceptance/Desperation: I feel as though these two interlink as the kids are all desperate for a way out of their situations and are so desperate to have a home and to be accepted into the society they have been sent to.
Systems: How everything is run by the government and that in the case of the refuge, some of these systems are definitely corrupt, yet not much light in shun upon these subjects
Family: How the kids have left home and are now in search for a new family and people they can develop relationships with
Refugees: This play is all about Refugees and their journeys to the refuge camp
Diversity: This play is about different children of different backgrounds and how they all suffer from the same pasts, yet they are still able to live with one another; together.
Duties: How the management of these refuges handle everything from eating to sleeping and even fighting. What is ethically right? What is the correct choice to make when in a given situation like a teen who is potentially lying about their age
Past-Present-Future: Statistics from the past and references from how the systems and how everything is run is mentioned, we also see the past of a character like Kojo and how this can effect the future (the stabbing) of the lives of these kids.
Overall message of the play?
Looking at the themes and reading through the play several times as a group I have come to the conclusion through looking at the background information about the author (do this!) that this plays message is that these kids coming from abroad need to be better cared for and that this has been happening for ages and that maybe more people should try to shed light on these issues. In the final scene of Fugee all the kids give out statistics about the rejected kids and about the harsh reality of their situation and in order to magnify these issues and make the objective of the play more apparent we could use lighting or spotlight on each of the characters as they speak out in a sad concerning way about the statistics and that can leave an impression on the audience.
Refugee stories:
In class we were reminded of the importance of trying to understand our characters in order to embody them with much more success, in turn it will make your acting much more believable and make you a better actor. In order to achieve this with Fugee I decided to research into a couple of real examples of Refugees and their struggles in getting to this country and adapting to their environments and their struggles within the country. I found a website with examples
Upon heavy research, not much information is circulating as to what Abi Morgan thought about refugees and her relationship with them in the past. However it would be safe to say that she must have met a good few when she moved to 7 different school as a child because of her mother constantly looking for acting jobs in different towns. Therefore she must have encountered several kids of the calibur of those in the play and observed their way of going about their daily lives, whether it was bullying to trouble studying a foreign language.
Who are we performing to?
The audience we will perform to will be other students from around the college doing performing arts courses and also out of school friends if they would like to watch us perform. This could mean that language should be slightly changed in some scenes to suit the audience and help them understand what is going on. For example, modern slang could be used in some scenes so that some of the members of the audience have a better understanding of what is going on as from observation many students in the college do not have very good grammar and do have tendencies to talk proper English. We are also performing to an audience who will be sitting on one side like a Proscenium stage. This would mean we will need to make sure that we are not blocking one another on stage during rehearsals and to keep our best interests on the audience.
Where are we as actors?
As actors we have all come quite far as individuals and as an ensemble. At the beginning of the year we were all very shy to speak to one another and each of us was quite frankly scared of judgement from the others. We have now established a good foundation and trust as a team and we have all climbed out of our shells too and become quite confident to perform in front of one another, though there are still some people who are still slowly climbing out their shells so I have found that everyone goes at a different pace to one another. Considering this factor, when we went through the casting stages people got certain characters based off of their abilities to work as an ensemble and whether their attendance was better than others as that is quite important in all corners of life. I ended up getting my role as Cheung as my attendance was one of the highest in the year and that my ability to work in the ensemble was great.
Themes:
The themes which we have observed in Fugee are:
Rejection: In that many Refugees were not accepted because they didn't look a certain age
Communication: Throughout the play we scene that people have trouble understanding one another as everyone comes from different backgrounds. There is also a language barrier which needs to be breached in order to communicate with the teenagers by translators
Acceptance/Desperation: I feel as though these two interlink as the kids are all desperate for a way out of their situations and are so desperate to have a home and to be accepted into the society they have been sent to.
Systems: How everything is run by the government and that in the case of the refuge, some of these systems are definitely corrupt, yet not much light in shun upon these subjects
Family: How the kids have left home and are now in search for a new family and people they can develop relationships with
Refugees: This play is all about Refugees and their journeys to the refuge camp
Diversity: This play is about different children of different backgrounds and how they all suffer from the same pasts, yet they are still able to live with one another; together.
Duties: How the management of these refuges handle everything from eating to sleeping and even fighting. What is ethically right? What is the correct choice to make when in a given situation like a teen who is potentially lying about their age
Past-Present-Future: Statistics from the past and references from how the systems and how everything is run is mentioned, we also see the past of a character like Kojo and how this can effect the future (the stabbing) of the lives of these kids.
Overall message of the play?
Looking at the themes and reading through the play several times as a group I have come to the conclusion through looking at the background information about the author (do this!) that this plays message is that these kids coming from abroad need to be better cared for and that this has been happening for ages and that maybe more people should try to shed light on these issues. In the final scene of Fugee all the kids give out statistics about the rejected kids and about the harsh reality of their situation and in order to magnify these issues and make the objective of the play more apparent we could use lighting or spotlight on each of the characters as they speak out in a sad concerning way about the statistics and that can leave an impression on the audience.
Refugee stories:
In class we were reminded of the importance of trying to understand our characters in order to embody them with much more success, in turn it will make your acting much more believable and make you a better actor. In order to achieve this with Fugee I decided to research into a couple of real examples of Refugees and their struggles in getting to this country and adapting to their environments and their struggles within the country. I found a website with examples
On
the website, looking at the story of Naseen there is a real
loneliness when leaving your home town as no one speaks your language
abroad. Although she did feel much less lonely as she had kids she could
communicate with. From her experiences with the people abroad in
England it seems her experiences had been positive. Looking at this
information I can get a better insight into how the children feel within Fugee and I
will try to adapt this into Cheung in the scene when he talks to the
social worker and he tries to trick Cheung into going back to his home
country, I could adapt this information by making him much angrier and also make him quite unfazed by the social workers attempts to trick him with language.
Farid
is another guy who left his home country and sacrificed everything to
get to refuge. He even swam the seas between turkey and
Greece and nearly drowned. When he got to the UK and found a foster
family after so much rejection he was put in school to learn English. He
found it hard to learn the language and as he was learning he got
bullied in school. This can help me understand why Cheung and Hassan
bullied one another for example when Cheung says "Fuck off Saddam". Because they both didn’t know too much English and
were so different they must have tried to protect one another from
potential bullying by being rude. This makes a lot of sense and I am
definitely going to try to integrate this into my character by making him much more defensive towards Hassan's attempts to patronise him.
I found that after looking at this information and then checking my script, I find that there are several new ways I could play certain parts of his lines in order to make him more of a child refugee rather than any old child. One way I could do it is to make him talk slower and make it seem like his understanding of English is still quite flawed especially in that scene when he is talking to Kojo in bed. Without this method I definitely wouldn't have played the character as well as I could and I hope to use this methodology of doing background research in future productions and later on in my professional career.
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