Posted by: archive
« on: August 15, 2007, 03:44:33 PM »
Hi Kate,
Aleks Sierz´s book says "the older man, the abuser, is infatuated with a young black girl who cannot reciprocate because she is haunted by an abused past that she can neither remember nor forget. At the same time an older woman tries to seduce a young man in the hope that he will father the child she is desperate for. In this case A stands for abuser, B for boy, C for child and M for mother. The trouble with this approach is that it tends to limit interpretations of a deliberately open-ended text".
I think these descriptions of A,B,C,M help on the first reading, but then you should start letting them go.
As a comparison, John Arden says about his play Serjeant Musgrave´s Dance:
"I started off calling the character ´The Surly Soldier´ ... if you call a character ´The Surly Soldier´, it is going to make an actor think he has got to be surly all the way through. It was not until they had names that the soldiers really came alive as people".
I hope this helps rather than confuses
Iain
Archive 17-4-2001