Process

‘Wasting your time here, ain’t any criminals in HERE’ (WAKEUP Theatre, 2013, p.5).Characterisation of Ronnie.

Jessica Helen Crosby

Within our production of 130,000 I played the character of Ronnie, a troubled adolescent from South-East London who is a key witness to the stabbing of a character called Kwame. Throughout the rehearsal process I enjoyed developing the character of Ronnie immensely. Initially her character felt alien to me as Ronnie is not the type of character I have played before, therefore I had to think about her back story and how she feels living in a complex environment of poverty and gang culture. She has an upbeat and exciting personality along with some unpredictable behaviour, she is vulnerable and naive, she follows the crowd and looks up to her best friend Shanice, and tries to impress her constantly. Ronnie is the type of girl who failed at school and is a slight disappointment to her family, making her needy and emotional. Therefore I gave her some characteristic that I felt suited her and this description. I spoke with a fairly strong South-East London accent with a very slight Jamaican feel, as this is where I feel her family originated. I gave her a harsh vocal quality when speaking certain words, for example, when saying words like, here, though, I lowered the register to give more emphasis and to gain a comedic element to the speech, and I pronounced ‘th’ as ‘d’. Furthermore I made her speech slightly rhythmic and elongated certain phrases, I gave her physicality’s which mirrored this rhythmic quality. I had chewing gum when rehearsing and during the performance as this helped me to sustain the character throughout the production and gave attitude to her persona.

The character of Ronnie stemmed from watching Fallout on channel four, this gave me a good base to how to play Ronnie, it also gave me an insight to the relationship between Ronnie and Shanice. The character of Ronnie also developed through intensive rehearsals in which we responded to each others characters and utilised the notes provided from the director, dramaturge and other actors.

I also performed two verbatim extracts, one from Doreen Lawrence, Stephen Lawrence’s mum, and the other from Conan Taffee a whiteness who appeared at the scene when Stephen collapsed. This was to be delivered to the audience not necessarily acted, as we are not becoming a character we are speaking the real words from real people, this is not to say that there is no emotion on delivering the verbatim, it remains more about the words than the character. I found Doreen’s verbatim very emotional when speaking her own words, I felt her pain as a mother who was grieving, therefore the emotion was inevitably attached to the words. This piece of verbatim was at the end of the play and one of the most integral parts to the performance as it encompasses our company manifesto and defines the entire piece of merging fiction with verbatim. Therefore, I had an important job in making the text authentic, but at the same time, producing a compelling performance to express the seriousness and realities of the play. This was the reason behind ending the play with a piece of verbatim, as our script writer wanted to leave the audience with the realties behind 130,000.

With Fallout being inspired by the cases of Damilola Taylor and Stephen Lawrence it brings about representations of real events, even more so with our insertions of verbatim,

‘Williams is intervening in a way that may allow new meanings and new understandings to emerge. The degree of success with which he can do this depends on how readily the parties involved can accept his representation as a sound basis for renewed consideration’ (Derbyshire 2007, p.418).

We as a company had to invest in the representations of the characters and the verbatim text and so do the audience. For the concept to work and for the performance to be innovating and inspiring, we all had to completely absorb our characters and understand the subtext. At first playing the character of Ronnie made me question, how am I going to play a young black Jamaican girl? After attending a workshop by Theatre maker Andy Smith entitled, ‘What does it take to make a theatre?’, he demonstrated through his methods that an audience can achieve believability in what is being presented in front of them. Just as an audience believe that Jud Law played Hamelt and they invested in him being Hamelt, the audience will invest in our characters because we are putting it in front of them. This is also supported through the story and the emotional connection the audience make with our characters, with Ronnie being funny and slightly stupid they liken to her and therefore it is believable, furthermore I believed my character one-hundred percent which conveys itself to the audience making it easier for them to invest their belief.  The audience build a connection to the fact that Ronnie has a huge predicament of whether to tell the police that her best friends boyfriend killed Kwame, furthermore the connection to Emile goes further, the audience feel sympathy when they see him living with the guilt but also feel bad for feeling this sympathy because he is guilty of murder, but this is why the characters works so well and is why the audience invested their belief and furthermore is why it becomes irrelevant that we are not black, the emotion, intensity and realness of the story supports the believability.

Derbyshire, Harry (2007) ‘’Roy Williams’’: Representing Multicultural Britain in Fallout’, Modern Drama. pp.414-434

Smith, A, (2013). What Does it Take to Make a Theatre? Theatre Company Guest Workshop, Lincoln, LSPA

Performing Verbatim through audio

Robert Smith

Performing verbatim material is difficult enough on stage, putting yourself into the character of a real person and repeating dialogue that came from someone spontaneously. In a way it is the ultimate in reality drama and a good way of achieving dialogue that is as naturalistic as possible. What was more challenging was performing verbatim knowing that it was only going to be the voice that was heard and not being able to act with your body as well. Recording verbatim with a microphone can feel artificial and you are neither surrounded by other characters or audience to work off. In addition, you are not clothed to suit your character, another helpful tool in getting into character which can hinder your performance. In order to rise to this challenge, I found it useful to gesture with my hands whilst speaking, physically acting even though I couldn’t be seen, hoping that it would add another dimension to the realistic sound of the speech. It was also helpful to close my eyes an imagine reliving the story that I was recounting so that I felt closer to the experience and was able to think about the emotions of the person I was acting as. In this way, I was able to change the dynamics throughout the verbatim extract to make it more realistic and engaging for the audience to listen to. I was not entirely happy with the final result and felt that it lacked some clear phrasing and dynamic variation, but I understand that it is one of the most difficult ways to present this type of material on the stage.

Using the Stage Space

Robert Smith

Unaccustomed as our company was to having the use of a professional theatre space, there were some challenges when it came to suiting our performance to the space available. As we are used to performing in smaller, more intimate studio spaces, it was important that we adapt our performance to a much larger space, without it appearing stretched or too sparse. We aimed to use the space as a visual spectrum of society, with the café set on one side of the stage and the court stand on the other. One side of the stage represented the law, its formalities and systems and the other side represented chaos and the randomness with which the crime was committed. We felt that it was important to use all of the space available so that the scenes could flick from one space to another, keeping the audience interested and never remaining in one place for too long. Another way we achieved this was with the use of lighting, designed to isolate the areas of performance and direct the audiences gaze. In this way, the large stage space became several smaller locations, sometimes constant and at other times changeable. This also enabled the scene changes to occur more quickly as the various sets were already set up.  With such a minimal set, it was easier to transform spaces from one location to another, with the simple movement or arrangement of chairs and tables we were able to achieve several different places.

Using Facebook in marketing

Robert Smith

As manager of the Facebook page, I had full control of the content that was available to the public on that page. I consulted the group with regards to the profile picture and the cover photo and we had already had some logo design ideas. I felt that it was important to settle on a logo for our company before making the page live so that there was no confusion about the branding of the company and that there was a consistent image behind our production. Once we had settled on the image, which was an alarm clock reflecting the Wake Up brand. I created the page, added a short bio about our company and a shortened manifesto to give the public a clear and concise understanding about the project. Once the page had gone live, I began to invite friends to ‘like’ the page enabling any content published to appear on their walls and giving them the permission to react and interact with that content. The company each liked the page and began inviting their friends as well so we were able to reach more people quickly. I began to upload relevant content to the page, including news stories involving knife crime, murders and other shocking stories involving crime and injustice. This content set the tone for the performance and whilst was not all directly about our production, did offer an insight into the sort of information Wake Up was interested in and taking influence from. The company was interested in getting to know the audience in order to best suit their performance and so I set up a vote post on the site which asked the audience whether they had been a victim of knife crime, also offering the options of ‘no’ and ‘I know someone that has’. This gave the company information about the relevance of the subject to our target audience, which were students of the university and adults. As it happened, none of the voters said that they had personally been involved in knife crime but many know someone who has which then made us confident that we could present our performance that would inform and stimulate concern for the topic without upsetting those that have been affected. With the case of Stephen Lawrence causing such a long lasting effect on the legal landscape of Britain, there are still stories emerging relating to the case and its effects thereafter throughout our rehearsal process, we were able to post about the case, and on-going developments to keep our audience up to date with the story that was so central to the influence of our performance.

The Facebook site also acted as part of our publicity and marketing program. We were able to advertise our performance, make our audience aware of where and when the performance was going to take place and offer links to the LPAC website where they could purchase tickets and read further information. By creating an event on Facebook, we were also able to get an idea of how many people were planning to attend, as we knew that ticket sales were likely to occur much later in the process. Having that information enabled us to consider how we wanted to interact with the audience based on the potential size of it. Uploading pictures to the site was another way in which the audience could get an insight into what we were doing, get a feel for the tone of the piece using costume, location and light. Pictures were much more interactive than text based posts because people could see the actors that they knew personally and this caused some discussion and excitement for the performance.

Characterisation and development of the character Joe

Robert Smith

Joe is one of the most challenging characters to portray for several reasons. Firstly, his ethnicity is a challenge because it differs significantly to that of the actor. Joe is a middle aged, black police officer who has returned to serve the estate in which he was raised. It is not just Joe’s ethnicity which poses a challenge for the actor but also his age and his social position, including the professional and personal relationships he shares with other characters in the play. This character description is more than daunting to a young, white, middle class student from the midlands.

What I felt most important about playing Joe is to avoid stereotyping. It was essential for the tone of the play that the entire company remained on the right side of this line in order to avoid creating undesired comedy through the creation of caricatures. In order to avoid stereotyping, it was important to be subtle and maintain ambiguity regarding his ethnicity, as I felt it was one of the less important features of his character profile. It was important to prioritise elements of Joe’s character in order of relevance to the narrative. In this way, Joe was reinvented in order to serve as a functional character in the play acting often as the voice of the audience, teasing out information from the guilty characters about their criminal activity.

With the play having been based on Roy Williams’ play Fallout, and a subsequent television adaptation, I took influence and reference from them both with regards to playing my character, seeking to find inspiration in mannerisms and physical stance, as well as the subtle ways in which the actor uses his voice, both dynamically and in tone. In this way I was able to take the traits that suited my portrayal of Joe and leave the more inappropriately authentic traits out.

Joe’s characterisation changed a couple of times throughout the process. This was largely due to the professional relationship he had with his colleague and superior, Emma. What is most interesting about these characters is their different approaches to the case, Emma taking a very systematic approach, noting down every detail she can find to find some sense in the something that is so nonsensical. Joe on the other hand prefers to take a practical approach; he is opportunistic and takes a great deal of initiative in his work. He is not always as respectful as he should be towards his superiors, largely I believe due to his frustration towards the miscommunications occurring between the authorities and those they serve. This relationship was interesting to develop as I wanted to find the line between being unconventional and being insubordinate. Initially, we tried having Joe being disrespectful to his superior officer by pushing in front of her through a doorway or giving her dirty looks, rolling his eyes at her etc in an attempt to show his contempt for her. Whilst this achieved a strong contrast between the two characters, we decided ultimately that it was too strong a contrast to be considered realistic and that sort of behaviour would have got him into trouble. Once we reined those behaviours in to an acceptable and realistic level, the complexities of the relationship were able to reveal themselves. The relationship became one of mutual respect, despite the obvious differences in personality and professional style. It was important for these characters to respect one another as the have a shared goal and need to work together and this comes through in Joe’s timidity and reluctance to take over from Emma in the presentation scene.

Joe had been drafted in to work on the case because of his familiarity with the area and the gang culture, having grown up on the estate himself. This position of importance affected the way that I portrayed him. For me, Joe would have a complacency about him having been called up for his skills and unique expertise and it is for this reason that he was able to bend the rules somewhat and get away with more than he would under any other circumstances. Although I wanted to achieve this air of complacency with his role, what was more important was his personal attachment to the case. Having been born and raised on the estate, I saw him as an older version of Kwame, an outstanding individual who had managed to break out from the vicious circle of crime and poverty and for this reason, felt that he had returned to make a difference. It was this personal relationship to the place and the people that fuelled his desperation, frustration and anger towards the failing system.