Mugged by Andrew Payne

I performed in Mugged by Andrew Payne. I played the character of Taylor who was a deprived boy who has turned into a bully because of the people that he is around. Mugged is a play about six teenagers that are affected by the things around them, two are bullies, two are boys who are good friends that try to act cool and the two girls go along with the bullies. The teenagers are scared of “the muggers” and this ends up in one of the six being stabbed.

In my essay I am going to study the plays of mugged and Blood Brothers and also Billy Elliot.

My character of Taylor is a street wise teenager who is one of the school bullies. He victimises people who are quieter and less street wise than him. He is scared of some individuals across the park that they all fear and see as muggers but intimidates those less powerful than him and makes it look like he is not scared when he secretly is.

I played the character of Taylor using some techniques such as walking in the way that a teenage boy would walk and also raising the tone of my voice to make me seem a lot more superior and also talking louder than I normally would.

I tried to base that character of Taylor like the character of Tony Elliot, Billy’s older brother. The actor who played Tony showed his power and authority by raising his voice and he seemed like the type of person who would break the rules but he was very loyal to the miners on strike by not caving in because he needed the money he continued with his work mates.

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Although he was over powering when he told Billy to dance on the table he was trying to show compassion that he is only a little boy and should not go to ballet school.

I tied to play Taylor as very headstrong but towards the end he was a bit lost in whom he was and what he was doing there and I tried to show that he also had a compassionate side. Playing the part of Taylor in mugged helped me to understand how a person like this would relate to the settings around him and also the other characters on the stage. The part of Taylor is a bit like the character of Sammy Johnstone in Blood Brothers because even know they are not the main character in the play they are still a character that has a lot of impact on the other characters and of the outcome at the end of the production.

The characters of Sammy, Tony and Taylor have an outcome on the productions that I have used above because they cause life changing situation and in the plays Blood Brothers and Mugged someone ends up dying and Tony changes the decisions that are made but does not affect the play as much. The set of mugged is very simple compared to the sets of Blood Brothers and Billy Elliot. The set of Billy Elliot is the main background of the village miner’s hall and the bedroom and house was brought in by hydraulics under the stage and other things are brought in by the cast and crew.

In Blood brothers the main setting in the first act is the old council buildings on the stage right and on the stage left a posh middle class house. In the second act it changes to some better presented council houses again the other parts of the stage are brought in by the cast and crew. The setting of Mugged was very simple because we performed it in our school so we had two park benches and a bin in between the two benches and that was it so that the set did not distract the audience form the performers. Also this is all that we needed for our play to make it look realistic.

Our costumes were very simple me, Sian who played Leon, Allanah who played Marky and Kerry who played Dig wore jogging bottoms and a zip up hoddy to look like the style of people who were trying to be. Penny who played Mel and Georgina who played Soph wore there school skirts and a coat to look like slutty girls. In Billy Elliot each character had more than one costume because the play was over a few months the only person who wore the same costume was Mrs Elliot because she only was on a few times and she was dead so she did not change.

Also in Blood Brothers they were a few different costumes because they are playing people over 10 years apart so they have different costumes to show the differences in age and also how they have grown up. Most productions on the West end and in most theatres are different to ours because they have people making the costumes and doing the makeup but because we only did it in school we did not have to do much to make it look good because people do not expect it to look good because it is only armature dramatics so we would not have very good costumes and also we would not have a very complex set.

The theme of Mugged is mainly Friendship and who to make friends with and how friends act towards each other. Our play is also about peer pressure which ties in with the plot of both Blood Brothers and Billy Elliot because in both of these plays there is a lot of peer pressure. In Billy Elliot there is peer pressure because the miners are pressurised to stay on strike but Billy’s dad decided that he would break it for his son to go to ballet school. And in Blood brothers Sammy and his gang pressured Mickey. Linda and Eddie into things that they don’t want to do and end up in trouble.