Drama Project - Short drama review

My Dream/My Reality – Jon Hardy & James Ward 

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/films/p00nscrw

This is a short drama based on a true story from the view of a victim; a girl who was taken away and used for sex trafficking. The story is shown through a girl on a stage who is acting out what happened to her and throughout the piece there is no diegetic sound as the story is told by a narration over the top and there is also gentle piano music to build the story in some places but through most of it there is only narration and lots of silence which I think works nicely as it makes you focus on harrowing tale of the victim giving you chance to think and reflect on what’s happening and what’s been said. When it gets to the point where she’s actually explaining what the men did to her an eerie noise starts to build which aids in giving you this uncomfortable feeling while you listen to what happened but it remains very much in the background so you don’t notice it as the aim is to build a subtle tension I think with the audience without detracting from the story. As it comes to the end and the girl is saved and the piano music builds again which is nice as it fits with the sadness of what happened but also the more happier side to it that she was eventually discovered and returned home it also carries on through the credits which I think is poignant as to me it symbolises that even though this ordeal is over the effects of it will last on for the rest of this victims life.

For me what also made this short drama more powerful was when she was acting out the parts where she was locked in this bedroom it would keep changing from the stage bedroom which didn’t look too bad and had nice soft lighting to what looked like what could have been the actual bedroom as you could see the cold brick wall she was surrounded by and the lighting was much more clinical and this made it feel a lot more real. I liked this technique because performing it on a stage for an audience could take the seriousness out of something but by constantly changing, quite subtly sometimes, from stage to an actual room absorbed you more into the story and even though it is based on a true story it made it feel more believable and you could start to imagine this small horrible bedroom that she would have been trapped in as on a stage it’s hard to completely feel that.