Unit 13 -Contemporary theatre.
Unit 19 - Principles of acting (Stanislavsky and Brecht).
Word of the week: Truth (theatrical truth)
I am working with Ryan and Dan and we have cast ourselves as:
Dan: Jimmy (A self centered, pompous man. Married to Alison, brought up from working class.)
Ryan: Cliff (A great 'pick me up person' for when things are getting tough, loves Alison but knows that he can never be with her.)
Me: Alison (Brought up rich, now lives poor. Shares a house with the two men for a while until she leaves to shortly return, back to her same life but with a lot more drama going on.)
I am working with Dan and Ryan because I really liked the scene that we will perform, it really stood out to me and when reading it I instantly imagined working with these two people. They really fit the roles in my opinion and I work well in a team with them anyway.
My character
Alison was brought up well off in her family, with a childhood best friend; Helena. She then falls in love with Jimmy, a working class man. They move in together but it isn't easy, they are both now quite poor and have a room mate, Cliff. My character is in a love triangle, she really does love Cliff but Jimmy is her husband. She then turns a tragedy and falls pregnant with Jimmy's child when she knows he really doesn't want it. Later on she leaves Jimmy and returns home. She returns eventually to take back her place rather than Helena (who took over with Jimmy when Alison left) and finally looses her child and basically hates her life but knows that she has to keep on moving.
We are doing pages 24-28 when Jimmy is basically ranting and Alison is ignoring him. Cliff tries to lighten the mood dancing with Jimmy and Jimmy ends up throwing Cliff into Alison and she hurts her arm. Alison gets angry at Jimmy, throws him out of the room and Cliff tends to her resulting in Alison telling Cliff that she is pregnant. I really like this scene because it is so dramatic for all of the characters, there is no main character they all play a big part. It is such a dramatic scene all the way through and it shows a lot of real emotion and tension.
We made a plan for the scene that we are doing in how we block it and go through with it. Our plan of blocking is:
* When we start the lights are down and slowly rise up with Jimmy's concert music playing. Alison is ironing looking slightly irritated and Jimmy and Cliff are reading the paper until the music is turned off, Jimmy looks at Alison angrily and the piece begins with Alison's first line of annoyance with her husband Jimmy.
* Jimmy paces round while saying a huge speech about women and how dreadful they are, then Cliff gets up slightly disgusted in Jimmy's behavior to change the mood around with happiness and jokes. He starts to dance with Jimmy around the room while Alison continues to iron, then moves across the stage with her ironing and the iron on top carefully maneuvering around the boys 'wrestling'.
* Jimmy throws Cliff into Alison purposely, maybe not to do the damage that he did but to do something at least. This escalates and Alison gets knocked over with the hot iron burning her arm, she then is helped up by Cliff but is still very angry and lashes out at Jimmy.
* Jimmy and Alison have a moment of hatred for each other suddenly and Jimmy leaves the room. Cliff then tends to Alison's burn.
* He helps her out and leaves the room, she has a moment of panic until Cliff comes back.
* Cliff continues to help her, she then gets angry with the amount of help (she probably isn't used to it and already is worked up) and starts to freak out then lets out the news that she is pregnant.
The way that we have blocked is very kitchen sink drama, also naturalistic and simple. We will be using Stanislavsky system most defiantly. We are using more of Stanislavsky rather than Brecht because there are a lot of differences between the two, the differences between Stanislavsky and Brecht are:
- Brecht: 'Doing' a character.
- Stanislavsky: 'Being' the character.
- Brecht: The big picture, the meaning of the play and with no actor training.
- Stanislavsky: More about truth and naturalism. More abstract, expressionistic, natural and has actor training.
Also, the 'unit' is different to the 'objective'. The unit is when the character does a movement and the objective is what the character's reasons for doing that was.
A technique used will also be 'crossing the threshold'. This means crossing territory, an example of this would be when Helena tells Alison that she needs to leave Jimmy and she does, then Helena gets together with Jimmy herself, despite the fact that up to that point in the play she hated him with a passion. This is a great example because this is something that you would least expect, it is really unusual and nobody would of thought that it would happen. I think that this is a good technique because it is a plot twist in the play and keeps the pace up and exciting when it really could of got a bit boring at that point.
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