Consequenses

We watched a physical theatre performance called ‘hard To Swallow by Mark Wheeller’. It’s basically about the story of an anorexic girl, Catherine Dunbar and her struggle to cope with her eating disorder, it’s mainly told through the words and actions of supporting actors and Catherine’s mother. It shows how her family have a daily struggle trying to cope with Catherine and her disorder.

Introduction to the play
During the first few minutes of the performance we see all the actors on stage and the mother begins to explain the circumstances she’s living in and she also portrays her daily struggle and what she has to go through to keep up with her daughter and her eating disorder.
We notice the mother is distraught and is feeling near enough useless, this is shown by her body language which is tight and intense, her vocal production then emphases this because she’s suggesting that she’s trying as hard as she can to be a good mother but she’s feeling like she’s not doing enough and it would all be better if her daughter wasn’t going through the process of an eating disorder.
I think this was the image mark Wheeller was trying to portray to project that anorexia and other disorders may have damaging effects on the victims and their family or people around them.

Setting
The colour of the stage was plain black; this could have been suggesting that this was going to be a production that didn’t seem so enlightening or pleasant to watch. There also wasn’t a use of props since the production was going to be a physical theatre performance having props would defeat that object since the actors where the props. The style of the stage was proscenium arch because the audience sat in front of the actors, I think Mark Wheeller chose to have the staging like this because it represented a more intimate feature of the production and the audience would be able to be more involved in the performance. In addition because the performance is based on a sensitive issue