'ROAD' - Post 04

Character Risk Feedback

Monday 30^th March, Wednesday 1^st and Thursday 2^nd April 2015

What was this week’s main focus?

     Week four into ‘ROAD’ continued our risk development of our characters and increased our understanding of the play and its themes and meanings.  In the previous week I managed to gain a decent understanding of my character and his purpose within the story:

·         He is a retired war veteran.

·         He drinks away his tragic and haunting memories of losing his friends.

·         He is lonely and doesn’t like the new state of his society.

·         and He strongly reflects the theme of Sorrow and Downfall.

     Plus last week I came up with a sketch plan for my character’s wardrobe.  All in all this proved to be a positive in my eyes.    This was backed up with my decent understanding of the time period and the meanings of the play, which I aim to go into further and deeper detail in my main/official character profile.  What did I know already?

·         Set in the 1980s – A decade that saw masses of changes, involving Margaret Thatcher becoming Prime Minister, currency changing (pounds), economy changing, and of course (a change that is strongly identified within ‘ROAD’) the youth generation of that time becoming more sexually active and giving little thought to their health and society.

·         ‘ROAD’ is extremely reflective of these themes – Change, loss of control, and fear (all three strongly reflective through the character’s motivations, speeches and actions towards one another, showing a story of how different perspectives take a huge toll and outcome to the society).

     I also found that these two points strongly identify my character, ‘Jerry’, and his basis, motivations, and development throughout ‘ROAD’.

     But in this week it was our task to show what we have achieved so far, performance wise, and what we knew and understood about our characters and receive risk feedback.  The risk feedback had us split into groups of three and four, where we’d perform a piece of our monologue/scene to the other members of our group and they’d give us feedback to how we could change the performance to make our main performance more affective and meaningful.

What feedback did I receive?

    I delivered the first half of ‘Jerry’s’ monologue (the current piece of script I have already learnt).  I presented my current understanding of the character and demonstrated the character’s accent, physical status, and pacing both verbally and physically (all to show my sense of understanding and projection of meaning with ‘Jerry’).  When my short performance came to an end the positive feedback I received was:

·         Good accent.

·         and Good use of stage space.

     These two points boosted my confidence, especially when it came to mastering the accent (as I did find that to be a struggle to begin with).  But what risk feedback did I receive?  These are the points that I will strongly take on board, as it gives my alternative performance styles of ‘Jerry’ and projects similar and different meaning to the character.  The feedback I received was:

·         Take a slower pace – To really explore the sense of sadness within ‘Jerry’s’ vocal and physical pacing of his monologue.

·         Give ‘Jerry’ a darker tone – Through this I would be able to give a deeper meaning to his speech and project a sense of sexism, laziness, and little pity within his speech.

·         Show an origins story “perhaps his wife left him” – Within his monologue he does give constant reference to the old days (the 1950s) and what “girls” did and didn’t do.  “The girls stayed in the dance hall”, “girls didn’t even go in pubs”, and “the girls, so pretty.”  This could come to my advantage and project another tragic origins story; maybe he has stronger disliking/hatred towards the opposite sex.

·         Play with the pacing – I think, through my rehearsals, I can take the pacing of both his speech and his motivations I can really reflect the darker tone, the tragedy, and horrifying truth behind the character ‘Jerry’ and what he brings to ‘ROAD’.

·         and Experiment with his personality – Linking back the previous point concerning ‘Jerry’s’ second tragic origins story, where his sexism came to a higher and worst perspective, this could also indicate a slight sense a ‘pervert’ within his gestures and speeches towards the opposite sex.  This could increase the audiences conflicted response to the character, they may like him at first but after hearing his response to women they might think of him as a creep. 

     All of these points are something I would like to seriously incorporate, it would test my acting ability to project mix emotions: sadness, hopelessness, depression, eagerness and creepiness.  I would then make my character all the more intriguing for the audience and reflective the older generation of that time period.  I could also show how ‘Jerry’ dislikes Generation X (the youth generation that changes everything in the 1980s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X), Thatcherism (a female Prime Minister and the theme and change of Sexism in the 1980s: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/thatcherism_01.shtml), and the currency and economical changes that had a huge impact on Britain in the 1980s: http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/630/economics/economy-in-1980s/).    

How has this changed my view of my character and the play?

     At the end of the week, once I managed to perform using the changes to my character, from the risk feedback, I received good feedback:

This is great…

·         Tone of voice.

·         Emotion behind the lines.

·         Facial expressions with the pause “and the girls”.

Keep working on…

·         Be more confident when doing the accent.

·         Speed up the pace.

     I found this feedback extremely useful towards my performance, it showed that taking in the risk feedback proved to be an extreme positive and projected that tragedy and creepiness of ‘Jerry’.  Plus with these action points I feel I can succeed (with a little more rehearsal) and bring him to life.

     But as to the question of: how has this changed my view of my character and the play?  I find this hasn’t changed my view of the play vastly, as it still reflects the themes of change and how the time period was devastating for many people and the play offers various insights to the world.  Although this has strongly changed my view of ‘Jerry’.

     At first I found and thought of the character as a sweet, innocent, and tragic character.  But now I find that he has a darker creepier tone to him and enhances the real dark and haunting vision of the ‘ROAD’ that Jim Cartwright set out to bring to life.  I sincerely hope to bring this character to life now in the creepy and dark manner that has already proven to be effective.