Rehearsals

Day of performance: Schedule and dress rehearsal

Charlotte Meek

I created a tight schedule for the day of the performance so that time would be used wisely and the actors would be able to get the most out of the day.

  • 9.am get in
  • Tech first thing – cast in studio 1 doing a line run and going over any scenes
  • 12.pm lunch
  • 1.pm cue to cue run with lights and sound 
  • 4.pm dress rehearsal 
  • 5.30pm Break for dinner
  • 6.30pm all cast in costume for warm up on stage
  • 7.pm cast talk, last preparations
  • 7.20pm all cast members on stage for audience entering
  • 7.30pm show time.

During the dress rehearsal i sat as an audience member and made notes on any last minute technical requirements and positioning and volume issues. It was also important that these notes noticed the successful performances from the actors.

DRESS REHEARSAL NOTES:

  • Lovely first speech Jessica Dyer
  • Jess Crosby you were not in the spotlight (stand on marked spot)
  • Julia first verbatim – great
  • Volume in general could be a bit louder
  • Nice enterence police
  • Phone sound for Jess Crosby needs to come in sooner
  • Nice speech Leanne
  • Commit to take over the speech with Rob, Leanne you are in charge
  • Wait until you sit down to speak Rob, you are going back to the previous scene
  • Get rid of the throw on the sofa, it is too slow to put on
  • Julia you could get up earlier to make sure you build enough tension to throw the chair
  • Jess Crosby where are your earphones?
  • Nice monologue Jess Clubbe
  • Make sure everyone’s head is up for the verbatim – get eye contact with the audience
  • Leanne good voice
  • Chelsey much better in the gang scenes and with Shanice
  • Really nice stood verbatim Jess Dyer
  • Leanne please wait before coming on – let Rob read the paper for a while
  • Have the fight lights been moved? they could do with panning out even more
  • Really nice in the fight Julia
  • Quieter to walk on in blackouts everyone
  • ‘Divvy up’ scene is great
  • Nice interrogation Jess Dyer
  • Rob you are not in the light when you say ‘shit’
  • Rebecca’s last verbatim very good

At this stage of the process, as expected, most of the notes are positive and notes to work on are just positioning and volume.

At 6.30 i conducted a cast warm-up, this was important to get the energy and concentration levels up for the performance. This warm up was planned in advance to ensure the warm- up was concise and timed correctly.

Firstly i told the actors to walk around the space, think about their breathing and what they were going to be doing on stage. I told the actors to think about a line that they say in the play, they started off by saying the line in their head, they then whispered the line getting louder and louder filling the space with noise. The actors then stood on opposite ends of the room and recited the lines from a scene. This made them project their voices to the actor they were addressing as they were on other sides of the theatre. Both of these activities made the actors think about the volume needed in the performance.

The cast then formed a circle, i decided that we would play a fun game to get the energy levels up. Wink murder is a game which can be played with all age ranges and is a fun way to get the actors heart rate up.

To make sure that the concentration levels of the actors were addressed i decided to play a quick rhythm number game.

Finally each member of the cast found their own space around the stage, they closed their eyes. I spoke about remembering personal props, about the meaning of our performance to an audience. I felt that this ensured that the actors were well prepared for the performance ahead, which turned out to be a great success..

‘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.

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.