Mixture of Realism with Non-Realism in John Godber's Play Bouncers

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Mixture of Realism with Non-Realism in John Godber's Play Bouncers

John Godber was born in 1956, in Upton, West Yorkshire. He graduated

from Bretton Hall College, Yorkshire, England in 1978 as a qualified

teacher of drama and English and went on to an M.A. in Theatre at the

University of Leeds where began to write, direct and act in a

succession of increasingly successful productions. His most famous and

critically acclaimed play is Bouncers, which was nominated for Comedy

of the Year in 1985 and won seven Los Angeles Critics Circles Awards

and five awards in Chicago in 1987. The play is about a group of

Bouncers, who, through a mix of realism and Non realism, tell the

story of what happens in the discos and after the bars are closed.

In the first act, we are introduced to the characters: Judd, Ralph,

Les and Eric. While there is dialogue between the characters, it is

not in the context of a realistic scene. Instead, the style of the

dialogue is of a Greek drama, or in chorus style Here, Godber uses

non-realism in order to capture the audiences attention. The advantage

of using Non-realism in a play is that there are no boundaries;

anything can be included in the play. During our practical for the

first act, we had several ideas of how we could address the audience.

The fact that this is non-realism was a huge advantage to us, as we

could perform in any way that we felt best suited the play. We decided

that the scene should reflect the way we would perform. All the

characters are very excited and happy in the first scene, so we used

this in our body language and voices. The result is a fun performance

that the audience could interrupt in any form they wanted. Also, we

were able to perform the dialogue in a way which would reflect the

atmosphere of the scene. We also added some actions with some of the

lines:

Hip gipp hop bop

Drink that slop and don't you stop.

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