Actors, Directors, Scripts and Styles Performance

Aim of Task:

To perform the extract of the plays we had been rehearsing to perform during class.

Description of Task:

There were three different extracts that the whole class performed: "Whose Life is it Anyway?", "Ubu Roi" and "The Caucasian Chalk Circle." Felix, Shari and I performed this last one with Oda as a director. Since there was more than one group performing the same extract, this let us see the differences in the director's points of view. For example, the first to extracts that we saw where of "Whose life is it anyway?" There is a point in the play where patient starts talking to the doctor in a way as if the patient was looking down to the doctor. One of the directors decided to illustrate this even further by actually making the doctor sit down and let the ill patient stand up and talk to the doctor standing up, pointing at him with the finger and shouting. Another interpretation that I really liked was the other group of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. They made it in a very creative way: the female character was a male and the male character was a female. Since some of the lines in the play where puns that not everybody might have understood, they also used a power point which emphasised the important meaning in each line.

While performing, I forgot some of the lines at first. However, Oda as a director helped me reminding them. We performed the whole play as we had prepared afterwards. I felt a lot less confident when performing in front of all the class though: it is part of an actor to be able to stand in a group of people and act just as well as if there was nobody there. This is something I need to improve as a theatre student.

Reflection:

We could have performed better as a group. However, we learned from our errors, and we learned a lot more from the process of performing the play. The same play could seem very different with different directors. The director's point of view is even more important than the lines written on the play. I need to be more secure about my performance on stage. To improve it, I will rehearse more on my own but I also think this will improve as I do more performances in front of bigger audiences.

Conclusion:

Performing even a small extract of a play can take a lot of preparing for it to be the best it can. It is a great amount of teamwork, everyone has to make their best to contribute. A good team creates a good product, a good play. A cast is a team with the director as leader. Even though the director is the leader, the cast is just as responsible as the director of bringing a good product to the audience.