Trapped Characters

The main characters in this play are trapped by either design or circumstance in a situation. This means that away from the story line each character is trying to escape from their own little entrapment brought on from either another or that character itself.

Little Voice is the most trapped. Mari, Ray say and Mr Boo trap her all in their own special ways. The only times in the play when she has escaped, is when her Dad visits her in her dreams, when she listens to her records and at the end of the play when Billy comes to rescue Little Voice from the fire.

The structure of this play goes as follows.... Introduction, leading on to the big scene, major scene, The die down where everything starts to go wrong and then the last scene where everybody leaves their past roots and starts up a new life this is also known as escaping from the old and going to the new. The scene where Little Voice escapes, I think, is shown in two places, where Little Voice and Mari are having an argument and Mari is trying to force Little Voice in staying with her....

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"Mari: LV"" I beseech you. I beseech you, LV."

"I beseech you! I beseech you!""

LV:" Ma names Laura. And then Laura leaves Mari by herself, and they are both alone now. These few lines are showing Mari begging for LV's forgiveness. The other showing of escape with LV is when she goes to see Billy right at the end of the play, to exercise his birds and she lets the dove go free, which can also symbolise freedom.

I think that the only person in this drama that doesn't escape was Sadie. I think this because, She was actually always trapped by Mari, She was just tagging along all of he time, towards the end Mari told her to go away by saying, "Your too quiet to be my friend you, Fuck off" But then at the end of the play when Ray leaves Mari she goes running back to Sadie. As you can see Sadie just goes along with whatever Mari says because she would never be able to get a word in edge ways. I think that this is why at the end of the play LV escapes and says what she has to say. These few lines show how LV and Mari are totally different.

Jim Cartwright shows great structure in this play by wrapping each scene around the man character for that scene. This works very well because it shows each character in detail, for example their highlights or their downside to them.

Each character has its own different function....

LV: She is the structure of what the play goes around. She starts off as a quiet little nothing that is always getting in the way of Mari and Ray, She is also at the beginning of the play a 'silent' character, as she never says anything, it s almost like she is either autistic or as if she has just recovered from traumatic experience. But by the end of the play she has come alive, as now she has overcome her fears of other people tormenting her.

I found that each character had another character that was similar to the other in some way, Mari and Ray Say, they were both loud, argumentative, they both only loved Little Voice for her money, and they both had a poor ending when LV said that she didn't want to do another show because neither of them never listened to what she had to say, so by the end of the film there was nowhere for them to go so they would have to start a new life with nothing.

The next two characters that resembled one another in some way were Sadie and George. Most people see these two as background characters as they hardly ever speak and they are only in that scene so that another one of the characters can speak. I feel that these two people get pushed out of the play a lot. Billy pushes out George and Mari and Ray Say elbow Sadie out.

Finally you can guess who is coming next, yes, Little Voice and Billy, They both start off as somewhat quiet characters as when they first meet it seems like neither of them have a tongue, But by the end of the play they have gradually worked themselves up to be the bravest and the most powerful characters as they both have each other and they haven't lost anything (that they wanted!) through this whole situation. This likeness of characters and consequences is called echoing.

There are lot of key lines in this play that represent what will/can happen in the future of the play, for example,

Mari: And looky here, LV. Prink prink. As we leave, star pgling down the club, the artiste, the minder and the Mum.

This is important in the play as Mari is thinks that everything is going to be great in the future but doesn't realise that Little Voice only said that she wanted to do the performance once, and the audience realise this, so they know that everything is going to go wrong towards the end, as well you see her dad wave goodbye at the end of her performance (only in the play) which could mean that she isn't going to sing in front of an audience as she will only perform when her dad is watching. Another key line could be....

Ray: For god sake, wise up and fuck off.

This is a key line because, Ray is trying to tell Mari that all he wants is Little Voice for the money, but he is trying to tell her in a blunt kind of way so that (as he thinks) he will not hurt her feelings as much as he would of if he had just walked out, and as well he is just arguing with her to try and blame her but really it is his fault because he just used Mari to get to Little Voice.

The most useful/ base of the play moment is when Ray Say and Mr Boo hear Little Voice for the first time outside her bedroom. This is important because straight after that clip Cartwright shows to the audience that Ray is using Mari, he displays this by.... They were all (Ray, Mr Boo & Mari) going down to the pub, and Mari calls him along and he says that he wants to stay and listen to her, which makes Mari realise that maybe he is using her as the day before he said to Mr Boo that she's the one, and Mari thought that he was talking about herself.

I fell that this play was set in the end of the 1990's by reason of that mobile phones were not invented, The BT van was quite modern and that the costume and staging was of modern times. The language too was very modern and simple; you could tell that the characters were of a lower class just by looking at the scenery, housing and language used, for example there is a lot of slang going on especially between Mari and Ray when they are mucking around, i.e.

Mari: See 'em all standin' up then? In some cases this could show that they are both quite common, which could prove my point of them being lower class and quite poor. My favourite part in this play is at the end where Ray thinks that LV has gone mad on him because she starts acting like here heroes, (Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Bassey), to try and scare him away to get him to leave her alone, besides that it is quite a shock as you are not expecting her to act like this which is good because it shows that Herman (director) has done this purposely to fool the audience.

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