Term 3 Week 1

Our timetable has now changed as now there are only three weeks left until our first performance; we now have much more time scheduled for rehearsal which means lessons are longer and more frequent. This is very useful as now we are able to fully concentrate on making Table as good as it can be.

We ran the first half to get a feel of what shape it was in after the time off and there were several sticky parts that clearly required more work. We then returned to the problematic scenes and the most useful to me that we ran was Part 2 Scene 2, Sarah's flashback to the last time she saw the table, Finley and Albert upon its arrival in Tanganyika. The main issue was that it wasn't entirely clear that this was a flashback and just didn't really slot together as well as it should have.

Although I had already actioned this scene, there was definitely something that was missing between Will (playing Albert) and I. With the director we worked through the scene and rediscovered Sarah's objective and obstacle throughout the scene;

OBJECTIVE: To inform her family that she has been invited to become a missionary nun and say goodbye to them.

OBSTACLE: Albert is behaving in a very hostile manner towards her and is very angry with her, which is stopping her from getting her point across.

Once I had solidified this, it became easier to work through the scene but I faced a problem that I was reacting the way that I would react - raising my voice and being annoyed with Albert.  However, actually I don't think this interpretation was correct because Sarah is a nun and throughout her childhood it suggests that she is a passive character who loves Albert so much that she just absorbs all of his hostility towards her. We experimented with the scene in adding some different direction and I changed the way I was delivering the lines as well as Will delivering his lines by becoming even more hostile towards me. This gave the scene a new dynamic and worked so much better as we both had something to work off, using the 'elephant in the room' which is Finley more than we had been doing. This was an important turning point for me in terms of this scene because it made the scene seem so much more meaningful and other cast members said they got different things out of it that they had not realised previously; an obvious success of the work on the scene.