Aristotle's six elements of The Women of Lockerbie:
The play, “The Women of Lockerbie,” was a great play filled with tragedy. It was very straightforward and easy to understand. Aristotle’s six elements of drama put all of the pieces together; plot, character, theme, diction, music, and spectacle.
The plot is the first of Aristotle’s six elements. “The Women of Lockerbie” is about a mother and father who search all the hills of Lockerbie Scotland to try and find their sons body since it was never found after the Pan Am 103 plane crash. Meanwhile, the women of Lockerbie are trying to take the clothes of the ones who died in the crash from the US Government. They want to wash the clothes and give them back to the victim’s loved ones. The climax of the play in my opinion was when Maddie told the story of her son Adam being killed. It made the play feel real and pure. Made the audience realize why they were in the place that they were.
Character is the second element. The protagonists of the play would be Maddie and her husband. They are the cores of the play because they are trying to find their son’s remains. The antagonist in “The Women of Lockerbie” would be the US Government because they are what’s keeping the victims family from having their clothes to keep.
Theme is another element. There are multiple themes in this play. One is tragedy. Tragedy is the number one theme because that’s what the whole play is about. The tragedy of loosing a son in a plane crash and the struggles you have to go through to get through it. Another in my opinion would be love. Love is what you can have to come together and feel better about the tragedy that happened. A good example of this theme is at the end of the play when Maddie and Olive looked inside the suitcases. When Maddie got up to help Olive take the initiative to wash the clothes, was done out of pure love.
The fourth of Aristotle’s six elements is diction. It was confusing at times trying to learn about the characters through their words. One character I could learn about through their words was Maddie. From the first scene that she did, you could tell that she was sad, mad, broken, and had a lot of grief inside of her. I could tell right away because she was crying in the first scene and the way she spoke gave us a sense that she was mad at the world do to this tragedy. She had all kinds of anger that she let out on her husband that added to that mix of learning how she handled her anger.
Fifth element is music, which there wasn’t a lot of in “The Women of Lockerbie.” In the beginning of the play when the Irish dancer came out and danced, that gave us a sense that this play was going to be based in Scotland. The only music in the play that stood out to me was at the end of the play when all of the women were washing the clothes in the river. It was a sad but uplifting moment in the play, which also went along with the music. The music made the scene come to life and made you feel like you were in the moment helping them wash the bloody clothes.
Lastly, the sixth element is spectacle. The set made us feel like we were in some kind of dark, spooky forest in the middle of mountains. The sense of spook came out when the fog was seeping over the set. The lights didn’t play a major role in the play. The one scene when the lights made the play seem real was in the beginning when all the characters had flashlights. The flashlights made the audience feel as if they were in a forest-watching people look for someone. The costumes of Maddie and her husband weren’t anything special, but the costumes of Olive and the three women stood out. Those costumes definitely felt like you were in Ireland.
In conclusion, “The Women of Lockerbie” was a great play, and Aristotle’s six elements of drama put all the pieces of the play together to make us analyze and understand the play to a greater extent.
