'ROAD' - Post 01

‘ROAD’ by Jim Cartwright

Monday 9^th, Wednesday 11^th and Thursday 12^th March 2015

What is ‘ROAD’?

     “1987.  An unpopular leader is re-elected, the country lives in fear of terrorist attacks and is still reeling from the effects of recession.  But for the inhabitants of a Lancashire street, there's a party to go to.  The vagrant Scullery is your tour guide, introducing you to an array of characters all trying to find some kind of escape from their squalid existence.  Jim Cartwright's play is an arresting mix of humour and pathos, transporting the audience with energy, passion and poetry, leaving you uplifted and reminded of the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit.” – Quote from: http://www.benchtheatre.org.uk/plays00s/road.php

     After a brief introduction, and a read through of the first act, I personally found this play interesting.  One element that fascinated me with Jim Cartwright’s play was its unusual structure and lack of a fixed plot.  I admired the ensemble cast of characters and the way their stories were told through monologues and dialogue.  As well as how they all interrelated through this narrative “tour guide” character ‘Scullery’.  I for one was interested and liked the look of this play, and was eager and interested to see where the play goes, where we were to go with it as our assigned performance, and particularly who I was to play.

What could I deduce from this play from the read through?

     When reflecting on what possible themes we could see within the plays script I, myself, could only deduce one powerful theme: change.  Particularly:

·         Change within society – as the play is set in the late 1980s when politics (Margaret Thatcher becoming PM), money (Pounds becoming the currency) and peoples attitude (towards sex, alcohol, Punk Rock) changed and had a huge impact on the world.

·         I could also see change within characters – whether simply in character development or in slight emotion traits, the characters within the play have a huge impact on each other and reflect the change within society.

     All in all I felt there was more than just one theme to this play, that I couldn’t see at first read, but when collaborating and sharing thoughts and opinions on this play, we, as a class, constructed this spider-diagram and wrote all possible themes and traits that have an impact on the unusually structured story within ‘ROAD’.  Here is our spider-diagram:

 



     I think this was a good introduction to understanding the themes and meaning behind the play.  Plus over-time and once we received a better understanding of ‘ROAD’ we could possibly expand on them and reflect them in future rehearsals and performance sessions.

Who was I cast as?

     What casting for ‘ROAD’ was completed by our lecturer, I had been cast as two supporting characters.  These characters were: ‘Jerry’, and ‘Eddie’s dad’.

     I personally was pleased to receive these two supporting roles, because this would offer me the first time experience in handling two characters in a professional manner and produce layers of information and detail which I could project in my future performances.  What staggers me the most about these roles, when light reading the script, I noticed their lack of stage presence.  ‘Jerry’ has a long and powerful monologue which I look forward to learning and performing, whereas ‘Eddie’s dad’ gave more a daunting physical presence.  But all in all I was pleased to receive these roles and was up for the challenge to bring them to life for the main performance.

What have I done towards learning and bringing my character to life, so far?

     When reading through ‘Jerry’s’ monologue I deduced several thoughts towards this character, and these thoughts were:

·         He struggles with the changes in his lifestyle – his monologue reveals that he served in the forces for some time and is now suddenly home where politics and money have changed vastly, and I see it as not to his liking.

·         He finds himself homesick in his own house – with the fact that he states that he served in the forces; his sudden return to home really wasn’t/isn’t to his liking.

·         I see a sense of social awkwardness – we don’t see ‘Jerry’ interact with other characters much throughout the rest of the play, and I’d like to think there is a reason for this, therefore I will set a goal to devise, or research, into an origins story for ‘Jerry’ giving reason and purpose to the character.

     Another group of exercises that we did towards this assignment was, questioning how we can present our characters, in both the main performance and in our character profiles.  It was these exercises that helped us to perform and understand the details that go into a performance and project reason, emotions, character traits and layers of detail.  These exercises listed from:

·         Pictures of Characters Statuses – This helped us to understand where our characters would/could stand if we were to physically show their statuses.  The pictures helped us to understand what the different statuses would look like and a physical exercise helped us to bring forth our understanding of the different statuses.  As we paced around the room assigned to project that statuses categorised between the numbers 1 to 12 (1 being the poorest and 12 being the richest) and a smaller group had to guess that status there were from their physicality.  This proved to be a fun and enervating exercise to get us physically prepared to adapt to our character’s statuses.

·         Reflecting on Animal Character Traits – For this exercise we were all given an animal, I was given an elephant, and from only looking at the image of our animal we had to deduce what character traits were in their physicality/well-being.  I deduced that the elephant was a character that was observant, strong and over-protective.  Then we had to project these traits physically and bring the animal to life.  Again this was another entertaining and energising exercise that helped us to project character traits, with little to no info on the character itself.  This is something I think will come in handy for our main performances to project character traits/emotions physically to give better understanding to the audience.

·         Projecting Emotions Physically and Verbally – In this exercise we were put into pairs, with one performer and another holding cue cards with emotions written on them.  Examples of the emotions: proud, aggressive, determined, etc.  In  my performance we had to improvise a scenario (like a group of friends camping and they’ve lost their tent) and bring forth these emotions physically and verbally.  I really liked this task because it helped us to project different emotions, yet keep a similar, if not, the same character alive just expressing different emotions.

     In conclusion, our introduction to ‘ROAD’ was entertaining and interesting, plus receiving a decent understanding of how to present our characters became an interesting and entertaining experience.  I hope to get a better understanding of the play through more and more research in reflecting on the time period and the theme of change and how it has had an impact on the play, the author, the characters and history.  But, more importantly, I aim to produce an excellent character profile reflecting all the exercises that we used to reflect emotions, character traits and performance strategy and bring it to life in a detailed and effect manner.