Rehersals

During our rehearsals we found that our improvisations started to explore more the relationships of people after the war rather than just women. Consequently we decided to do more research and find more stimuli that were to do with couples and relationships affected by the war and how that changed their love or life. When we were doing our improvisations and exploring each other and how we connected as two people after the war a common factor was shell shock and how the men became more distant after what they had seen.

We started to look at shell shock and how that still affected the men and their relationships once they returned home to their wives and how their couldn’t always get back into the old life that they had. I looked up the symptoms of shell shock:

• Hysteria and anxiety
• Paralysis
• Limping and muscle contractions
• Blindnes and deafness
• Nightmares and insomnia
• Heart palpitations
• Depression
• Dizziness and disorientation
• Loss of appetite

These are some of the symptoms and nightmares and depression are ones that really stood out to us as we wanted to explore the effect that they had on relationships and how a woman would have to try and understand what was happening – if they could. These lead us to improvise and explore how they would treat each other and at first how they would explore each other’s bodies after being apart for so long and if it would be like what they imagined or hoped, like they wrote in their letters. Another effect of shell shock was men not being able to get erections and the nightmare could lead to violence in their sleep and in real life, we wanted to explore if a woman could cope with this new man that had been brought back from the war and how the man would deal with the change that had happened to him.