JAEL KAGAI

IB THEATRE
JOURNAL ENTRY

16, Monday, February

Goblin Market PPP Performance
After reading The Goblin Market by Christina Rosetti, I thought it was really
interesting mainly as it was written in a controversial way that it deals with
various issues. I thought this poem is a comment to the society of that time
that regarded many issues as taboo. Working as a group trying to figure out
how to devise the play, we brainstormed during two class periods and came
up with a conclusion. Discussing the poem as a group was very helpful as I
got a different perspective on how each of us experienced the reading.
Personally after reading it, if I were to produce a play out of aspects in it I
would have based on the theme Love between sisters. As I though the
sisters ,Lizzie and Lauras close relationship enabled them to defeat the
mysteriously evil workings the goblins Before the goblins successfully lured
into giving them a lock of her golden hair in exchange of the fruit ,Lizzie
cautions and protects her by telling her not to even look at the evil fruits.
We therefore discussed our reactions to the poem and generalized our ideas
into a theme of Temptation which really worked well for as throughout the
reading it strikes the feeling of lack of safety and threat.

I played the character of one of the goblins. I envisioned my character to be

a wired and magical masculine creature who is very evil and cruel.
In the play, my primary goal was to tempt the innocent young girl, Laura
with our enchanted fruits and seduce her. I was successful in this as Lauras
desire to taste the fruit drives her into the temptation.
After our first performance, we got helpful feedback that actually served as a
huge help during the final performance. Avinash and I did not characterize
the goblins very significant as in the script during our first performance
which we later on worked on in terms of changing and making the goblins
mood in the scene be sad and angry goblin merchants. We worked on our
physicality a lot to portray them as being druggies and this was more visible
during the final performance.
The idea of working in a Poor Theatre had an influence to our decisions of
the play where time being a major factor, our original idea of was to have a
full length performance based on a long ranged plan which could cover about
1-2 hours of performance but this was interfered by the fact that we only had
five minutes or even less to perform our stimuli. Another aspect was lighting.
We envision our play, Market of temptation having dimmed lights and
darkened colors to reveal the core themes of danger and unseen threat.
However, we had no control over lighting as each group had to perform their
play and there was no time to for that hence all we were forced to do is to
work with what we had.

03, Tuesday, March

After working on multiple stimuli since the beginning of the quarter, I
developed farther knowledge on how to interpret them and how to use the
themes, scenes and mood to envision and devise a theatrical play. One of
the biggest challenges however has been narrowing my focus in terms of the
content and themes. I kind of always had ideas of what I wished that play to
look like but had it was tough for me to narrow it and putt all the ideas in a
range of less than 250 words to bring out a clearly understood play relating
to the scripts .Working on the I can only describe this entire project in just
one simple word interesting.
20 Friday, March
It has been a journey of learning what I never knew and making the best out
of my understanding. As I worked on my final chosen stimuli, A Boy with
Grenade I had flowing ideas after a close study of the image and reviewing
the Cold war experiences. I felt like there was close a resemblance as the
picture encompassed much symbolism based on conflict and war. Having this
perspective, it was easier to put it in words and come up with a play .The
play was a story of a family that has been separated after segregation era
hence the main character, a young boy named Kiowa seeks to revenge the
unkindness to the cause of his loss of his only family .