Charlie and The Chocolate Factory Following Weeks

 

In the next few weeks, we put a lot of thought into the set design behind the play. Our role as first years was to try and help our second-year actors with this, but a lot of the ideas and props were sorted out by Kelly, who did an amazing job.

Furthermore, we worked on the other scenes in the production. I specifically liked to work on the death/accident scenes. My role as ‘Mr Salt’ included one of these scenes, in which my family is pushed down a garbage chute by squirrels. This was a lot of fun, we had a lot of ideas on how to accomplish this, how we could bring the squirrels in and the placement of the scene, in order to make it look real to an audience. In our original idea we were going to use hand puppets and that transformed into the idea of using masks. Nevertheless, we ended up throwing all of those ideas away by the start of the production, which was probably for the best. Instead, we used the screen we had available to show a video of some cartoon squirrels. We also had many ideas of we were going to act out the scene where we fall down the chute. In the end Kieran, our technical producer, had the winning idea. We were going to fall off the back of the set onto a mat and so that was quite easily solved. I enjoyed doing this as in none of our other productions have we had to do stunts. This was a really great opportunity to show me how stunts are produced, the safety behind them and the amount of practice it takes to make them look correct for every show.