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Haemon and Antigone script work

  In this lesson we worked in pairs using the script focusing on the characters of Haemon and Antigone and the relationship between them.

So at first, we read the script as a class and discussed what we thought the subtext was, just gaining a general basic understanding of the scene  before going into pairs and working on it further.  We were then asked in our pairs to try and decipher what had happened the night before (an event that is referred to in the scene) and just create a really short semi-improvised piece that would explain the piece of script we were looking at.  So for this scene I was Antigone and my partner was Haemon and we just created this short moment of orientation where he would come in and realised that I was dressed like Ismene, smelt like Ismene, wearing all her clothes and her make up and we see his reaction to that and her reaction to him.  And we imagined Haemon to be quite shocked, confused by what Antigone was trying to do and kind of embarrassed for her. We imagine that he'd be quite awkward about it and then Antigone would be angry at Haemon for not reacting in the way she wanted him to. She imagined him to think that she was beautiful because she looked and smelt like her beautiful sister and she knows of Haemon's history with Ismene and she still questions whether it was her he loved or Antigone.  So after we had performed our short scene and looked at a few other pairs work we were then asked to stage the moment of orientation for the scene we were looking at today.  In ours we stayed quite true to the stage directions and as Haemon entered, Antigone would run up to him after making eye contact with him for a second and then they embrace and the first few lines of the script are said in this embrace and then they slowly move apart.  This lesson was only an hour long so after seeing everybody else's moment of orientation for this scene, we just got told our homework which was to write on to our scripts any bits of subtext we thought were evident in each line.  And below you can see my notes for that.


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