Evaluation of Show 2 - 02.02.16

Differences to the first performance;

This performance was the one I was most apprehensive about, because it was at 4:30pm and so attracted an audience made up of mostly BRIT students. I did not change anything about my performance to suit this audience, as I felt confident with what I had already worked on and thought that there were no changes that needed to be made. Approaching the performance, I was expecting slightly more laughter in certain places, such as the Sarah and Albert mimicking Finley and Veronique having sex on the table so talked to the actors in this scene beforehand and agreed to wait until the laughter had died down before we carried on so they would not lose any important information. 

The audience was lively, as expected, but laughed at parts I did not expect them to. As actors I think we handled this with confidence and maturity, knowing exactly how long to hold moments for so they could still hear what was going on in the scene. It was interesting to see that even without changing my interpretation of the lines that humour was found, possibly because the age range of the audience was younger than in the previous show. This gave the performance a different dynamic and was naturally more fast paced, as the audience were clearly engaged with what was happening. In this show, the first half was the fastest we had ever done it, which may insinuate that we rushed through some moments. I think for the next show we need to concentrate on not moving with the pace of the audience, but maintaining our own pace that works well for the piece.

Apprehensions;

Something I was quite nervous about was whether the 4:30pm audience would understand the actors playing multi-roles and sharing parts. Before the show, as a cast we decided to try and make it as clear as possible which actors were sharing roles and really push our characterisation for this show. Due to this work the audience seemed to have no problem understanding who was who and it was rewarding to speak to young people after the show who had enjoyed it.

Another apprehension I had going into the show was whether we would be able to recreate the success of the first performance which was a week beforehand. We had not been in the rehearsal room as much and had only done a line run the day before as opposed to continually workshopping and running the play. Thankfully everyone arrived on time on the day of the performance at the time we had agreed and we were able to do a focusing session in the space and a full warm up. I would have preferred to do a dress run, but this was not possible due to the stage being reset to our staging. I thought of this as a negative at the time, but looking back, it was a great experience knowing that in the future if I was in a professional production, I may not be able to do a run before the actual performance. Considering we had not done any rehearsals for a week, the performance went very well and we all seemed to slot into place in the theatre.