Initial Reactions

After the first reading of the play, we had a discussion and shared our ideas about the play.

From my first reading of the play, I thought that the main theme or question and something that I think should be a running theme throughout our piece, is to what lengths are people going to have to go to become grateful for what we have got in our lives and to stop asking for more. One of the really interesting things that stuck out to me when reading “Blondie”, the character D does never deny what she did, “I did yes”, I thought that this gave the character more power over the others. However she did give a reason for what she did: “not once did they stop and look around and realise that they were in a free country,” this was a really thought provoking statement, as it made me as an audience member, think about how much I take for granted in my real life, and what horrors it might take for us to realise that. It also in some way justifies what she does and although what she did was horrible, in a way I understood that there was a need for something to make a change.

Also “Blondie” made me think about politicians and how manipulative they can be. It made me think about how it can become a popularity contest and that it was to do with how they look or what social activities they do; “Obama singing rhythm and blues”, but not actually about their policies or politics. This thought, rightly so, worried me because it makes me think about how much we as citizens know about the people who run our country, this makes me think that I don’t know who they people in charge are, and this could lead to us not knowing about what choices they are making.

 Also, when we were discussing in class the different characters, some people thought that A and C could be the same person, as A is overly angry and official, however C is very inappropriate and talks about how attractive B is. Someone said that C could be the subtext of A, and this idea, I thought was a really cleaver one, as it when A tries to avoid the question of who he voted for and C then says that he did, I thought that that would be a very cleaver way of showing the two sides of people and even the two sides of the way that people think and vote; although they are supposed to vote on politics and be professional about it, instead they just go for the looks and what attracts them the most.