Sessions 9 and 10 - Term 2 Week 3

Lesson 1

Themes

We began the session by having a debate about the importance of themes following on from our work last lesson. Our director posed the argument that the themes are more useful in the rehearsal room for the actor to understand the shape of the piece and how individual scenes fit together like a jigsaw to reveal the bigger picture. He said that themes are not very useful to an actor when they are physically on the stage 'in the moment'. One of our cast members disagreed and said that the themes should be running through the actor's mind subconsciously and that the main job of the actor is to portray the themes to the audience. It was a very interesting debate, to which I added that the play is primarily a story, and the themes are what the audience members get out of the play. I agree that themes are important, but I believe that they are mainly applicable to the rehearsal room and inform the actors' decisions, but once themes have been embedded throughout rehearsals, they should become second nature to the actors and they should not have to think about themes at all. It is especially important to have this debate due to Table being a naturalistic play, where we are aiming to portray real people and show a slice of life. Therefore, I think we as actors, should be whole-heartedly committed to being our characters so that as individuals we should not think about the themes, and trust that they will be apparent to the audience as a testament of our understanding of the text.

Music lesson

After this, we went and had a singing lesson with the director of music to help with the sections of the piece that are sung. We worked through the song 'Lay Me Low' and broke it up into two part harmony so that all our voices work together. This was a really fun part of the rehearsal, and something I have done before so felt quite comfortable. However, as Sarah is the character who sings the most throughout the play, I know it is my job as an actor to fully know what I am singing and when I am meant to sing it. I regard the singing as just as important as the lines, and recorded the music director playing an accompaniment to the choral section which I will go and learn and focus mainly on this week.

Warm-up

We then moved on to doing a warm-up before beginning to block the play. We did an task that involved visualising and imagination, which I recognised as a Stanislavsky-style exercise. We had to imagine ourselves standing in front of a full-length mirror in neutral and then transforming into our characters. I initially found this difficult because I play my character at several different ages and wanted to make sure my exploration was as useful to me as possible. I decided on Sarah when she is 8, because I feared I had been playing her slightly too young in previous rehearsals and wanted to find some truth in her physical characterisation. We were given some points to think about such as where points of tension may be and how the weight of the character is carried in a different place. I discovered that Sarah would be quite free from tension in her body and would be rather bouncy in the knees, as eight year olds have a lot of energy. The text also seems to suggest that Sarah is very inquisitive and eager to learn more about the world, so I made her fast-paced and into everything she comes across. I found this an interesting and useful exercise, and will do this for Sarah at the other ages I play too. A possible advance of this exercise would be to find a through-line in the idiosyncrasies that Sarah has throughout all of her ages, and this is something that I will work on with Hannah (who is also playing Sarah) to make the characterisation as clear as possible.

Lesson 2

Warm up

Today we began with a simplistic ball game where the aim of the game was to work together to keep the ball in the air. It involved the whole cast and was a good way of warming up whilst having fun. It included a number of skills that can be applied to the play, such as working as a team and responding to others like we do with cues for lines. However, I don't think it was the most effective way that we have warmed up, because there was a competitive element to it which ruined the teamwork aspect and it seemed to become more concentrated around winning points than the aim of the game. If the competitiveness was taken away and there were no points of teams I think the exercise, in my opinion, would have been more effective and useful.

Actioning 

After we did this, we continued blocking the play and I used this as an opportunity to finish off actioning all my scenes which I had been working through during the week. I really tried to unpick the subtext beneath the lines and in doing so made some new discoveries about the relationships between certain characters. One of my peers in Table found an interesting article about the significance of actioning;

http://actingcoachscotland.co.uk/2011/08/actioning-why-it-doesnt-work/

The article makes some interesting points, but I think that actions are a perfect way to break down the lines and really understand what is going on in the scenes. Of course actioning is subjective, so the actions I have written down may not be what the other actors see in the scenes and may be different to how they play them, but I don't think that actions should be the only element to acting - there are many different things that influence the way a scene progresses. For example, in the scene to the left which I have actioned, if Will (who is playing Albert) on the night decided to play the action of 'to patronise' instead of 'to scare' behind the line 'Do you know why baby Albert's stuck in the house?' I would change the action behind my next line so that it makes sense for the audience. Therefore, although the actions are not set in stone and will vary within the scenes, I think they are important to get the scenes on their feet and are a good starting point.