Explore the impact of social, cultural and historical on your play

The historical, social and cultural influenced our play immensely because in order to create an understanding of our stimulus gender we needed to explore different sides to gender. We decided that in order for the audience to work out the meaning behind our play they needed to fully understand the idea of gender both past and present. During the creation of our play we thought it was important to bring up certain topical issues, we decided the main issues would be how women were treated in the past and present, domestic violence, love and relationships, stereotypes and social roles. We chose the idea of ‘lion tamers' because it was based on a circus however we twisted it so the scene was ‘lady tamers' to show how women were treated in the past. We started off with the ladies as wild animals with the men in the middle shouting out the orders such as ‘wash the floor'. Then we went onto more advanced techniques were we stood in a ‘Stepford wife pose' and spoke lines such as ‘have dinner ready, plan even the night before so he can have a warm meal on time. In order to create a realistic impression of what women's roles were in the past we looked at The Good housewife's guide this was a booklet of instruction from the 50s telling young women how to be a good housewife and because some of the instruction were incredibly †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ and unrealistic which we thought the audience would find humorous. We then decided to do go the other extreme with the scene where the ladies take over, we wanted the women to be powerful both mentally and physical this was to show how times have changed and in particular how women in society have changed. A very important issue we wanted to concentrate on was domestic violence because this was a hard hitting issue involving gender. We researched different aspects of domestic violence and found that it is equally common nowadays as it was in the past and although it isn't necessarily true for every case men seem to be the†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ of the problem. We had a real problem incorporating this issue into the initial idea of the circus because we didn't know how to make a serious topic humorous. Eventually we came up with a Punch and Judy sketch and this was Perfect because it showed the issue of domestic violence and stuck to the idea of the circus. As a group we decided that it would be nice to look at the positive side of gender because up till then it had all been negative. We used the idea of a tight rope act to show the ups n downs of relationships and love, we had a boy at one end of the tight rope and a girl at the other and they would walk along and take turns saying what they didn't like about each other and the other person would begin to wobble on the tight rope however after each little speech they would end it with ‘but I love him/her. ‘ We wanted to embrace the opposite sexes differences and make the audience view gender in a positive light.